Teranesia

He’d done what he’d set out to do: he’d carried her to safety. He was proud of that. But it wouldn’t do either of them much good if he kept on going through the motions for another fifty years, just because it was the only thing that felt worthwhile to him.

He’d very nearly kept her from joining the expedition, which would have ruined her whole career. Two days after she’d left, he’d almost followed her, which would have humiliated her in front of all her colleagues. And though he knew that she’d be safe, there was nothing he could do, nothing he could tell himself, to banish the feeling that he was standing idly by while she walked across a minefield.

There was only one way to cut the knot.

Prabir dragged the blade across his left wrist. He barely felt it pierce the skin; he opened his eyes to check the extent of the wound.

A red plume, already wider than his hand, was spreading through the water. The dark core looked almost solid, like some tightly packed blood-rich membrane uncoiling from the space beneath his skin. For several long seconds he lay motionless and watched the plume growing, observing the effect of his heartbeat on the flow, following the tongues of fluid at the edges as they diffused into the water.

Then he declaimed loudly, to remove all doubt, ‘I don’t want to do this. I’m not going to do this.’

He scrambled to his feet and reached for a towel. The wound was even more shocking when it hit the air, spraying blood down over his chest and legs. He wrapped it in the towel, almost slipping on the floor of the bath, his paralysis turning to panic.

He stumbled out of the bathroom. It was only a cut, a paper-thin slit. There had to be something he could do to stop the bleeding. Tie a tourniquet. But where, exactly? And how tight? If he got it wrong, he could still bleed to death. Or lose his arm.

He knelt in front of the TV. ‘Search: emergency first aid.’

The entire screen was filled instantly with tiny icons; there must have been thirty thousand of them. It looked like a garden of mutated red crosses, stylised flowers in some toy-world evolution program. Prabir swayed on his knees, appalled but mesmerised, trying to think what to do next. Help me, Baba.

‘No sacred, no mystic, no spiritual.’ The garden thinned visibly. ‘No alternative. No holistic.’ The towel was turning red. ‘No yin, no yang, no chi, no karma. No nurturing, no nourishing, no numinous …’

The TV remarked smugly, ‘Your filtering strategy is redundant,’ and displayed a Venn diagram to prove its point. The first three words he’d excluded had eliminated about a quarter of the icons, but after that he’d just been relassoing various sub-sets of the New Age charlatans he’d already tossed out. Whatever pathology had spawned the remainder of the noise employed an entirely different vocabulary.

Prabir was at a loss as to how to proceed. He pointed to an icon at random; a pleasant, neuter face appeared and began to speak. ‘If the body is a text, as Derrida and Foucault taught us—’

Prabir closed the site then fell forward laughing, burying his face between his forearms, pressing down on the wound with his forehead. ‘Thank you, Amita! Thank you, Keith!’ How could he have forgotten everything they’d taught him?

‘No transgressive.’

He looked up. Thousands of icons had vanished, but tens of thousand remained. Half a dozen new fads had swept the antiscience world since Amita’s day. Liberation Prosody. Abbess Logic. Faustian Analysis. Dryad Theory. Prabir hadn’t bothered to track their ascent or learn their jargon; he was free of all that shit, it couldn’t touch him any more.

He stared at the screen, light-headed. There had to be genuine help, genuine knowledge, buried in there somewhere. But he’d die before he found it.

As he’d meant to. So why fight it? There was a comforting drowsiness spreading through his body, a beautifully numbing absence flowing in through the wound. He’d made the whole business messier than it might have been, but in a way it seemed far less bleak, far less austere, to die like this – absurdly and incompetently – than if he’d done it in the bath without a hitch. It wasn’t too late to curl up on the floor and close his eyes.

No, but it was almost too late to do anything else.

He staggered to his feet and bellowed, ‘Call an ambulance!’

‘You might not find her,’ Felix warned him. ‘Are you prepared for that?’

Prabir glanced up nervously at the departure list; he’d be boarding the flight to Sydney in five minutes. Madhusree had covered her tracks well, and no one at the university had been willing to provide him with the expedition’s itinerary. All he could do was fly to Ambon, then start asking around.