The rapture, p.9
The Rapture, page 9
Through the open door of the recreation room at Oxsmith, you can hear the rapid clatter of a ping-pong game and the thud of MTV on the big screen that’s surrounded by a group of kids. Along the south-east wall, a lone boy, prostrate, is chanting tonelessly on one of the scuffed prayer-mats while a Tourette’s kid shifts from one foot to the other muttering expletives. I wheel my way past a hugely fat girl swaying to the music, her belly spilling over the top of her jeans, her face as smooth and empty as moulded plastic. She has wound T-shirts around her head to form a giant multicoloured turban. Watching her fixedly, a boy who a month ago removed his own eyeballs and had to have them surgically replaced, is gearing up to masturbate. Business as usual.
I find Bethany Krall watching CNN on the small television in an annexe off the main room, where two male nurses are talking desultorily and punching at their mobiles. She has made herself comfortable. Perched on a chair with her legs tucked underneath, she’s chewing gum furiously, as if there’s some kind of speed mastication record she’s hoping to beat in the course of her day, which is somehow related to the unfolding nightmare on the screen. I can see immediately that she’s riding high.
‘It’s back to the worst-case scenario,’ says a woman on the TV. ‘Hurricane Stella’s changed course again, and she’s now definitely heading for Rio. She’ll hit any time in the next hour.’
‘Yo, Wheels.’ Bethany grins as she spots me, then fists the air like a triumphant athlete. But with a third coffee inside me, I am back on track, and I refuse to let the latest news shake me. The only sane approach to what’s happened is to take it as given that Bethany’s prediction of the hurricane is a guess based on something she has gleaned, via the internet, from some obscure weather station. Or simply coincidence. What did Frazer Melville say? Case dismissed. My job, as a professional, is to manage Bethany’s conviction that it isn’t a random fluke. And even reverse it. The alternative — the Joy McConey model — doesn’t bear thinking about. The trouble is, when you deal on a daily basis with people’s fantasies not coming true, there’s no handbook on how to behave when they actually do. I’ll have to run on whatever instincts I have left.
‘Yes, you were spot-on, Bethany,’ I say.
‘Well, duh,’ she says through her gum. Her face is still pale, but the cheeks carry a faint, waxy flush, reminding me of those Madonna statues that cry tears of blood on demand in mystically devout pockets of the world. ‘Well, Wheels? Aren’t you going to say anything?’
‘I am,’ I say non-committally. ‘But I don’t imagine it’s what you’d most like to hear.’
‘You’re going to say it was just a random coincidence, right? Well, Joy was just like that at first. Back in the days when she was a zero too. So if that’s what you want to believe, you go right ahead.’ I nod slowly but say nothing. ‘They always give people blankets,’ she comments, jerking her head at the screen, and rolling her grey-green gum around on her tongue and teeth. ‘Why’s that? It’s not like it’s cold.’
‘Shock makes your body temperature drop,’ I respond automatically, trying to hide my irritation at the laconic, I-told-you-so way she’s watching the drama unfold. She can’t seem to imagine what this means for individual lives. For her, they’re like tiny pixillated screen-beings. Little Sims whose lives you can meddle with and overturn at will. ‘Especially if you’re wet. It’s comforting.’
It’s more than two years ago that I held Alex’s elbow and thought that cold flesh needn’t always be a bad sign. That if I just kept hold of it, kept squeezing it so he’d know I was there, passing on my warmth, everything would somehow be all right. I thought, too, about his family. Now everything would be out in the open. There’d be no avoiding it, no denying it, no more pretending. Sickness mingled with relief, and the hovering suspicion that I would probably panic later, if I could muster the energy. They would give me a tranquilliser of some kind, I hoped. Perhaps they already had. At that point, it didn’t cross my mind that I was badly injured. The fact that I couldn’t feel anything seemed like a blessing, a sign that I was intact, that I hadn’t lost anything. Yes: I’d been given some kind of tranquilliser. How good of them, how thoughtful, professional and well-organised. I could close my eyes and sleep.
‘My life is over,’ a weeping Brazilian woman in a floral dress tells the world, via a duhbed American voice. ‘Everything has gone. My baby is dead.’ Babies have a way of getting to me. I turn away. Through the window-bars, the sky is full of popcorn clouds.
‘Right. We’ll discuss this later. I can’t hang around,’ I tell Bethany.
‘Yeah. Anger management, right?’ She smirks, then turns back to the screen, where they have moved briefly to other news: Japan’s stock market has gone berserk, an actress who once starred alongside Tom Cruise has taken an overdose, the body-count in Iran has reached half a million. I’m just rolling out of the room when a stupid but brutal thought strikes me. I stop in the doorway and turn round.
‘What else do you feel you have known about in advance?’
She shrugs. ‘Lots of stuff. That earthquake in Nepal two weeks ago? I told you about it.’
‘Did you?’ At a recent session in the art studio I recall her reeling off a list of dates, places and events while drawing a diagram of what might have been a sex act performed by machines. But I was more interested in the artwork than the manic rant that accompanied it.
‘Yes. And you didn’t listen,’ she says, catching the nurse’s eye and offering him some gum, which he declines. I did listen, I think defensively. But I filtered. The way you have to, to make sense of anything these kids say.
‘What else?’
‘Try listening next time,’ she says, yawning. ‘It’s not like it’s going to stop happening.’
‘But this — thousands of people killed or made homeless, and if it hits the city—’
‘It will.’
‘Then thousands more lives about to be ruined—’
‘That’s OK, it’s cool,’ she interrupts. ‘Heard of a fait accompli?
Anyway, how come you suddenly care about all those South Americans? Because you didn’t last time I mentioned it.’ She shakes her head in disbelief. ‘It’s like Dr Ehmet. Hassan to you.
He’s Turkish, right? But when I tell him about the earthquake destroying Istanbul, it’s like talking to the wall.’
‘An earthquake in Istanbul?’ Perhaps the filter needs adjusting. Just as an experiment, of course. My stomach tightens. ‘Remind me.’
‘Next month. Put August the twenty-second in your diary, Wheels. It’s going to make this thing look like a fun ride at Disneyland Paris. Ay caramba!’
When I return two hours later, Bethany is still lounging in her chair, one leg splayed over the arm-rest, chewing her gum and watching Hurricane Stella whirling through Rio, a mass of roiling water, vapour and debris.
‘Oi!’ Bethany greets me with a waved hand in the air. ‘Come and join me.’ I manoeuvre alongside her. On the TV, helicopters pester at the storm’s tail like gnats, relaying images of the disaster zone: filthy corpse-bearing torrents that fill valleys and swamp plains, relief trucks blocked by precipices of rubble, and out at sea, glassy slicks of oil from shattered tankers. As Stella wreaks her worst on Rio, a deeper metropolis is revealed, skewed and ravaged, beneath the flesh of the old: a Hieronymus Bosch landscape of liquid streets and bust-apart shacks and unidentifiable shards that were once part of — what? Playgrounds, schools, bars, hospitals, brothels, homes where children bickered and adults made love and cooked rice and gave birth: the ebb and flow of simple, frustrating, difficult, normal, grief-smudged, passion-fuelled human existence. A fierce sunball hangs low over Rio, French-kissing it, upending day and night. Against it, an aerial view of the city blanketed by a swirl of cloud silhouettes the white statue of Christ the Redeemer on the mountain, with his outstretched arms blessing land, ocean and sky. Absurd, but it has never properly struck me before that the figure itself is standing to form a giant human cross. There’s something both terrible and poignant about the scale of it, as if its vastness and grandiosity is in reverse ratio to the economy that raised it, concrete testimony to a grandeur of spiritual ambition not matched on the ground.
‘It’s a credit to the foresight and expertise of the statue’s designer, Heitor da Silva Costa, that Christ has withstood the force of the three-hundred-kilometre-per-hour winds,’ says a commentator. ‘More than ever, in these terrible times, the Redeemer is a symbol of hope ’
‘Hey, watch this, Wheels,’ says Bethany excitedly. ‘Here comes the good bit.’
‘What do you mean by good bit?’ I snap, furious. Sometimes it’s a struggle to stay professional. Often you fail. And so what.
‘Shhh!’ she commands. I watch her sharp little profile. From the attentive, bright-eyed way she’s observing the events unfolding on the TV, you might think she’d had a hand in orchestrating them. The picture has flipped to another angle. It’s shakier footage this time, live, taken from high above the city, across from the statue. The picture zooms in on the white-robed figure of Christ high above the forest below. ‘A figure of eternal peace,’ says the news commentator. ‘Standing on the mountain-top of Corcovado, in the world’s biggest urban park, encapsulating the spirit of Rio itself and the hopes of a hundred million Brazilians that one day the devastation wrought today by Stella will be…’ The camera seems to jolt, and he hesitates, only to be cut off by a disembodied Portuguese voice which interrupts him in a fast, excited burst. Apart from the earlier camera-jolt, or what seemed to be a camera-jolt, it’s not clear immediately from the image that anything is wrong. Have I missed something? More voices join in, in several languages, all suddenly talking at once, in apparent confusion, as though a hundred TV channels have merged. The image flickers and resettles, the zoom pulls out then hurtles back in. Technical problems.
Then the knowledge slams in, and my heart misses a beat, leaving a time-vacuum in my chest. I say sharply: ‘Oh Bethany, no.’ I can’t look at her because I know she’ll be grinning. I think, Bethany, don’t do this.
The figure of Christ, now pictured in profile, sways and tilts forward.
Vertigo. Then a brief, yawning silence.
There are certain moments which you know you will recall for the rest of your life with perfect clarity. They are stamped with the blood’s instructions: you will remember because you have no choice. There’s a microsecond when the statue seems to do nothing, as if frozen in mid-decision, before it tips into its long and hallucinatingly beautiful death-dive, the white figure falling head-first in what starts as a slow lunge downwards as it disconnects from the plinth, then surrenders to the terrible grace of physics. I catch my breath. Its operatic scale is at once monstrous and riveting. The commentary has stopped. The only backdrop is a profound quiet. And then, with the stretched momentum of a fantasy or a lucid dream, the figure crashes into the mountainside, bouncing like a giant skittle and shattering into fragments as it goes: first one arm cracks and flies off, and then the other, then the torso itself snaps in two, the pieces tumbling at angles to drop into the thick smear of gas below, a mixture of smoke and oil and rain and cloud. A liquidised mirage of a place that might be Heaven and might be—
Watching it, and recognising it, I go hot and cold.
Bethany’s sky-diver.
‘Oh please no,’ whispers a man’s voice on the TV. ‘No, no, no, no, no.’ The silence broken, they all begin talking at once, shock-stimulated into a babble of disbelief, excitement and despair.
I belong to a generation that has seen statues and icons and buildings come tumbling down on TV: Lenin in Russia, the Berlin Wall, Saddam in Baghdad, the Twin Towers. But those topplings meant something to those who caused them. What does this mean? Who is to blame? What can one read into a random catastrophe, an out-of-the-blue event, an ‘act of God’?
Nothing. In place of an explanation, however grotesque, there is a void.
Without a word to Bethany, because I am unable to speak, I swivel round and roll out at high speed, a ball of revulsion trapped in my throat.
That night, at home, I turn on the TV and they are showing it again, and again and again because they know from experience that we can never get our fill, that it cannot become real until every detail has been absorbed and digested and processed and re-imagined. And sure enough, the swell of chatter in the wake of Christ’s epic fall has burgeoned into an international, interfaith Babel of opinion and emotion. There are weather experts, structural engineers, geophysicists, stonemasons, religious leaders, psychologists and even a conceptual artist dissecting the event. It’s established that soapstone, from which the statue was made, is highly weather-resistant, and unlikely to give in to strong winds, even at massive accelerations. But an engineer argues that if the base had been hit by a heavy object — not impossible given the colossal amount of debris sucked into the sky — then the statue could have become dislodged, balancing only by force of its weight. ‘Just look at where the statue stood: you can’t get much more exposed than on a mountain-top. Winds at that speed, and at that height…’ Another expert weighs in: it was not an accident waiting to happen, but ‘a freak convergence of weather and structural physics’. The net is buzzing with conspiracy theories. Christ’s fall was caused by a remotely triggered mini-bomb, part of a ‘9/11-style Jewish plot’. No, it was executed by Muslims on a hate mission. It was Iran’s revenge. Clashing opinions and interpretations vie for dominance in an atmosphere of excitement tipping into mass panic. The statue was slammed into by a flying object. It wasn’t struck by anything: it had merely eroded more than anyone realised. The Brazilian government knew this but covered it up. It was in extraordinarily good condition. No velocity of wind could wreak that damage on an object weighing a thousand tonnes. A toddler could have felled it with a single swipe.
Depressingly, the ‘fall of the Redeemer’ debate gathers momentum, obliterating the hurricane story. A radical Islamist cleric has claimed it’s ‘the judgment of Allah’, which has set a predictable chain of events — outcry, counter-attack, death threats — in motion. Anti-Muslim rioting flares across the world, countered by anti-Christian demonstrations and the burning of crosses: a war of ideologies, sparked by a falling chunk of stone. There are arguments about the dangers of iconography, the dangers of religion, the dangers of literalism, the dangers of scaremongering. Again and again, along with millions, I watch the fall of Christ, mesmerised.
But slowly, as the hours pass, sanity creeps back and the statue’s fall — which killed no one — is finally put in the context of the wider destruction the weather has caused. By the time Hurricane Stella concludes its two-day rampage, conservative estimates say that it has wiped out four thousand lives in Rio de Janeiro. The aerial images show hectare upon hectare of residential suburbs, of industrial estates and sprawling favelas laid waste, littered with slowly drying debris, corpses and rubble. The disaster relief agencies pour aid in, doing their utmost to prevent the spread of disease. But already, there are reports of typhoid. These are images I cannot bear. But I know that Bethany will be watching, chewing her green gum, soaking up the horror like a sunbather who can’t catch enough rays.
When I eventually get through to Frazer Melville he assures me that Hurricane Stella hitting Rio on the date Bethany predicted is, to use the jargon, ‘statistically insignificant’. Meteorology, he insists eloquently, is a notoriously inexact science, and much of it is simply guesswork. There are plenty of freak forecasts on the internet: Bethany could well have been trawling those. It’s easy enough to be taken unawares — as many were with Stella. But it’s just as easy to say you knew it was coming.
‘It’s like trying to second-guess a bucking bronco. Bethany got lucky, that’s all.’
‘If lucky’s the word. But what about your phone call? You sounded excited.’
‘Coincidences are exciting. So exciting I had to wake someone up at an ungodly hour. You were the obvious person. For which my apologies.’
‘A thousand to one, you said,’ I persist. ‘Is that statistically insignificant too?’
He sounds unfazed. ‘The good news is, I owe you dinner.’
Three evenings later Bethany’s sky-diver drawing, which I have ripped down from the wall of the art studio, lies in a folder at my feet in La Brasserie des Arts. I hate to eat alone only marginally less than I hate to microwave ready-meals or order takeaways. But by now I know the staff at La Brasserie well enough to have a favourite table, and to be greeted personally by the manager. Who smiles at me encouragingly when he hears that tonight, for once, I will have company other than Psychiatry Today.
When Frazer Melville arrives he kisses me on both cheeks and apologises for being seven and a half minutes late.
‘Remind me of the statistics of this not happening?’
‘Me being late? Very low.’ His joviality masks an edginess.
‘The hurricane.’
‘I said a thousand to one. But actually it was more like three.’
‘So you owe me two more dinners.’ While he fumbles his jacket off I pull out Bethany’s drawing and place it on the table in front of him. ‘Can you factor this into the calculations? She showed me this a week before the fall of the Rio Christ.’
I have written the date she drew it at the bottom of the page. I watch Frazer Melville absorb the image. The eye always travels left to right and top to bottom — the way Chinese hieroglyphs are drawn. He takes it in three times before speaking.
‘Noteworthy,’ he says finally. But offers no more.
‘It makes me feel less sure that it’s just coincidence,’ I say. ‘I mean, she would argue that she predicted this. And that she’s foreseen other things too. There was an earthquake in Nepal she claims she told me about in advance.’
