Tiger Work, page 12
No one challenged the complacency of that statement.
Fisher was in his room, thinking about all these unusual occurrences. He was holding his last glass of water for the day. He had been unconsciously looking into the water while he thought. In that state where the mind wanders but the eye is focused, he noticed that there was something odd about the water in his glass. It was like water, but at the same time it had a viscid quality to it; it caught the light in a faintly troubling way. He gazed into the water. Then he saw it. He wasn’t sure what he saw. But he saw it.
‘It’s the water!’ he said. ‘They’ve done something to the water.’
He hurried out of his room to seek his girlfriend. She was in the kitchen, watching the last dribbles of water from the tap.
‘It’s the water!’ he cried to her. ‘They’ve made it rare, but they’ve also made it strange.’
Under a magnifying glass, they could see curious striations in the liquid. The surface had a quality that suggested that it could be cut. A drop of the water revealed a world. It was with some horror that they drew back from looking. It occurred to them that the water wasn’t really water. It was some kind of simulacrum, virtually indistinguishable from normal water. When they rubbed it between their fingers, the liquid had a faint slipperiness. There was something altogether too finished, too real about it.
Later that evening the friends gathered to discuss what should be done about their discovery. They agreed that they should consult an expert and have the water tested, but realised that they could not trust any such expert. He or she might turn them in. They racked their brains, but could think of no one they knew who could carry out a thorough analysis without drawing the attention of the authorities. Their discussion made clear a number of things. They could no longer trust the water they had been drinking. They saw an immediate correlation between the change in the behaviour of the populace and the change in the water. They did not know when the water had been changed. But they knew that it had been this way for some time, because when they looked back they understood that they had all been more passive and less inclined to question anything for a while now.
‘There are two things we need to do,’ Fisher said.
‘Get the water analysed,’ said his girlfriend, Venus.
‘And stop drinking it,’ said one of the flatmates.
‘That means one crucial thing,’ Fisher said.
‘What?’
‘We have to find water that hasn’t been corrupted.’
‘How will we do that?’
‘I don’t know. We need water to live. Without it, we will surely die. The question is whether we go on drinking this water that is doing things to us that we don’t know about, perhaps turning us into morons, or whether we find water that’s untouched, that’s pure.’
They talked deep into the night. At first they thought they could somehow carry on as normal. Then they realised that their discovery had marked a turning point in their lives. They had to do something. They decided that they would live off the water in fruit. They would wash the fruit with tap water, but they would not drink it. They knew that they only had a number of days, after which they would begin to suffer the ill effects of not drinking enough water. One set of friends would take on the task of getting the water analysed. The other set would take on the task of finding new water. They drew lots. The task of finding new water fell to Fisher and Venus. They went to sleep that night exhausted but clear in their minds for the first time in months.
*
In the morning, they dispersed. The agreement was that they would converge at the flat after a week. If anything happened, they would abort the meeting. If any one of them was killed, the others would have to make their own way and try to convey their findings to the rest of society, provided there was anyone left to listen.
Those meant to have the water analysed set out first. They made for the university. They kept in touch through coded texts on their mobile phones. It all went well until they arrived at the university and met a member of the chemistry faculty who agreed to perform tests. The tests were being carried out, and some findings were about to come in when the coded messages ceased. Then all went silent.
Late in the morning, it became clear to Fisher and Venus that they had to begin their quest and that their flat might not be safe anymore. They took some essentials and travelled light. They had no idea where to go. They went to visit friends on the rich side of town. The friends found their story and their suspicions ridiculous. From a top-floor window Fisher spotted policemen approaching the house. He alerted Venus and they escaped through a back door and made their way through gardens and over fences. They left town. They visited relatives and soon realised that they were somehow expected wherever they turned up. So they avoided all the people they knew and decided instead to plunge below the surface of society. They changed their clothes and altered their appearance and disappeared.
They found themselves with drug dealers and lived rough with the homeless. They felt safe with the homeless. But there was a drought in the city. The great river flowed stodgily. Buckets and plastic bags and mattresses and garbage and fishing nets in which sea creatures were entangled could be seen floating on the river, along with suspicious-looking substances of an indeterminate colour. At night, in the streets, people sold water at high prices. They had barrels and buckets and plastic bottles of water. They wore masks because they did not want to be recognised by the many cameras that gazed at them from street lamps and the edges of buildings. People came out of their houses or furtively out of cars to buy water and then ran back to anonymity again. Fisher bought a bottle of water but one look showed that it was not fit to drink. The water was striated with wavy lines. Tiny globular dots could be seen with a magnifying glass.
Fisher and Venus drifted with the hordes of the homeless. Among them were those who had chosen to be homeless, who lived underground to escape the traps of modern life. They lived in tents in fields at night, or along the canals. The sanest among them drank no water, and their eyes shone with defiance; they spoke little and were suspicious of everyone. It was from them that Fisher learned that there were people who were making alternative water. They had their own mobile chemical operations and they distilled water from rainfall. Fisher sought out these distillers, searching through a warren of dim houses on the edge of the city. They were a cautious lot, for they had been infiltrated often by the government and lost many colleagues. They changed their accommodation nightly. Fisher and Venus came with recommendations and passed the lie-detector tests, but Fisher found the water they were processing to be no good. Though it appeared to be natural rainfall, it was nonetheless contaminated. This discovery was very upsetting to the secretive water-distillers. They threw Fisher and Venus out, accusing them of being saboteurs.
‘We’re not saboteurs,’ Venus cried. ‘We’re just trying to find the truth, like you, that’s all. But even nature has been corrupted.’
The water-distillers were no longer listening. They had spirited themselves away to another secret location. Fisher and Venus had no choice but to make their way back into the city. On the way, Fisher noticed a small headline on a sheet of newspaper that had been discarded in the street. For a long time now, their generation had stopped reading the newspapers or trusting them, as they were almost all owned by billionaires who had their own secret agendas. The papers that were independent were all edited and run by people who had gone to elite schools and universities where the education had long been tainted by the prevailing orthodoxies. There was only so much truth they could tell and, besides, they took their instructions covertly from the government, who insisted that the nation was in a state of siege. The news Fisher and Venus’s generation relied on came from underground sources, whispers, legends, things passed on and sifted by people they could trust, who were not paid and had no personal or political agendas. Nonetheless the headline caught Fisher’s eye.
‘Look at this!’ he said.
They read it together. There was only half of the article left. The other half had been torn by the wind.
‘The Water Wars,’ it read. ‘Now fully half the world is engaged in water wars. The other half has no water. Cities around the world are perishing of thirst. Where has all the water g—’
There was nothing else.
‘So, it’s global,’ Venus said.
‘Maybe. I wouldn’t trust that fragment.’
They sat by the roadside. They were weary. They hadn’t drunk water in four days. After a short rest, they continued walking. They sought out healers. But the healers they found had venal eyes. One of them made insinuations to Venus. Another claimed to have the best water in the world, but when she brought it out Venus nearly fainted at its colour. It was pitch black. It gleamed like mercury, and it tasted like water. It was the weirdest thing they’d ever seen.
‘I think I’m beginning to hallucinate,’ Venus said. ‘What was that?’
They were back out in the street. Venus had lost her mobile phone. She was sure the last healer they’d gone to had stolen it. They thought, after that, that they should maybe try scientists again. They had had enough of unreason. They caught a ride to Venus’s old university and sought out her former chemistry lecturer. They found him in his office. He had a few tufts of hair on his head but had copious hair in his nostrils and on the back of his neck. He looked old and a bit tired and there was no animation in his eyes when he saw Venus.
‘I remember you,’ he said. ‘It’s Venus, isn’t it? You were the prettiest girl in the whole university, did you know that? We all considered it a special privilege to have you in our class. What can I do for you?’
After the initial discomfiture produced by his remark, they told him. He listened to them with his eyes shut. When they finished, he sighed.
‘It seems,’ he said, ‘that I failed to convey to you the most fundamental tenet of science. And that is rationality. You must follow the facts. Don’t deviate from them. Your emotions are not important in science. Nor are your political views. Just the facts. Now why would anyone wish to tamper with the water? If it is, as you say, to create in the populace a certain uniformity of thought, how could this be achieved? I really don’t see how drinking water can alter your politics or temper your passions.’
‘But there are drugs designed to tranquillise. We use them for schizophrenia, manic depression…’
‘Are you suggesting that the government…? That is too absurd. It is unscientific.’
‘What about the analysis of the water, the floating dots?’
‘Water has never been pure. For thousands of years we have managed with impure water. It is only in the last hundred years that we have had the technology to refine it. Refining is not contaminating. Where did you get that idea?’
Venus and Fisher listened to him in controlled astonishment. It was as though he were addressing not them but their whole generation. He had some kind of grudge and they were bearing the brunt of it. As he spoke he got up and fetched himself a large glass of water from the tap. He drank it while watching them.
‘I drink this water all the time and there has never been anything wrong with my mental processes. In fact, they get sharper every day. This year alone, I have made five new discoveries which prove that most of the assertions of the environmental movement are claptrap. There is no global warming. The forests of the earth are doing just fine. There is absolutely no proof of a diminishment of any of the species. I keep being nominated for the Nobel Prize, so there,’ he said, and drank what was left in the glass.
They thanked him for his time and hurried out. They had just left the campus when a police van arrived. They plunged back into the substrata of the city. In their wanderings, they met people who claimed never to have drunk tap water in their lives. Some showed the youthfulness of their skins as proof. One of them was a Rastafarian who said he was a hundred years old and had lived so long because he had avoided all the corruptions of the system.
‘I see what dem do to the water,’ he said.
Upon further questioning, it turned out that he had not really witnessed anything. He was referring dimly to some second sight. Also, he was fuzzy about his age. Their inference put it at about eighty. But this was still impressive, given his evident vigour.
They met people who had heard rumours of good water. They were sent to many places, to many people. They met a seer, a wise woman, a psychic, a doctor, a philosopher. But none of them had any notion of where the good water could be found.
‘To question the water you drink,’ the philosopher said, ‘is to question the very fundamentals of the society you live in. It is like questioning the air you breathe.’
‘But some do exactly that,’ Venus said.
‘It is not wise to doubt your reality,’ the philosopher said. ‘Because there is no other.’
‘Is that true?’ Fisher asked.
‘I fear,’ the philosopher said, not hearing him, ‘that you have left yourselves out on a limb. You’ve cut the ground from beneath you. It is an unsustainable philosophical position. The water is good and has always been good. The next thing you’ll doubt is life itself, which is a very sure way to exit it.’
With that the philosopher dismissed them and took a sip from his tall, thin glass of water.
They had now gone seven days without drinking water, surviving on only the liquid from fruits. They felt as if their brains were shrinking. Even bottled water that supposedly came from pristine streams and lakes in the mountains had the same peculiar striations, the same barely visible whorls. This anomalous condition of water was universal. Fisher claimed that he was now officially hallucinating. He saw pools of pure water in the road. Venus saw fountains sprouting out of concrete. They became so parched that they finally agreed their course of action had been insane.
‘You can’t go against the world,’ Fisher said, hardly getting his words out.
Almost fainting, they leaned against each other. They shut their eyes and succumbed to oblivion. Then a child came to them.
‘What are you doing?’ he asked.
‘We were looking for good water we can drink,’ Fisher said.
‘But now we have given up. Such water does not exist,’ said Venus.
‘I know someone who has the best water in the world,’ the boy said brightly.
‘Who?’
Venus and Fisher opened their eyes.
‘My grandfather.’
‘Can you take us to him?’
‘Yes, of course.’
The boy led them to an opening in the earth and down stone steps into the dark depths. They went down for a long time. Sometimes the steps became winding and they descended in a spiral. It was very dark and hot. The child had no light.
‘Is it safe down here?’ Venus asked.
‘Very.’
‘Is it far to go?’ Fisher asked.
‘Very.’
They could not see the steps now, but they felt them. The walls were rough. They went down for what seemed like hours.
‘Who is your grandfather?’ Fisher asked.
‘Few people know.’
‘How did he come by the water?’ Venus asked.
‘It was always there.’
‘But why didn’t he share it?’
‘He did, but people didn’t want it. They wanted the one that’s killing them.’
Venus suddenly buckled. Fisher caught her. She was afraid and refused to go any further.
‘It wasn’t an accident that I found you,’ the child said. ‘We heard that you were looking for this water. You are the only ones who have sought this water in a long time. You would never have found it yourselves.’
‘Why not?’
‘The water has to find you.’
Then the child gave Venus something to drink in the dark and she felt stronger.
‘That’s the loveliest water I have tasted in my life,’ she said.
They resumed their descent. It became increasingly hard for Fisher to breathe. His legs were still strong, but his mind gave way. He began to topple over, but Venus caught him and helped him to sit on the stone step. He was gasping for air, like a beached fish.
‘I can’t go on,’ he said. ‘Just leave me here to die.’
Then the child gave Fisher something to drink in the darkness, and he felt stronger. The air became cool and reviving. He could faintly make out the steps in the catacomb blackness. He noticed that Venus’s eyes were shining.
They continued their descent. They could no longer hear their footfalls or the echo of their breathing. They became aware that the boy was no longer with them. There was only a faint white light ahead. Then they reached it.
There was a clearing. An old man was seated on a stone chair. Behind him, something shone with an unnatural light. That was what had lit up the dark.
‘What is that?’ they asked the man.
‘That,’ he said, ‘is the last real water left in the world.’
SOME MYSTERIOUS FORCE
Nature is beautiful
Can’t be denied.
Do we know why?
Mahogany trees in
Teeming forests
English elms whispering
In the meadows
The Gulf of Naples the colour
Of green diamonds
Sunlight glimmering on the grass
Cornfields in the moonlight
The misty crown of blue mountains
Waterfalls they call the tears of a god
Some unknown force behind it all
The emperor penguins
Fading from view
The piano-playing spiders
Juggling dolphins
Long-flying birds
Hovering bees
Outsider foxes and
Sarcastic wolves
Schools of fishes
That turn and dart
Together in telepathic motion
Fishes that leap
And contemplate the land
A moment and then reject it
Oaks that grow diagonally
