The Knife Decides

Strange days. Scarred fields, pockmarked with umber puddles, flung themselves past the train window. H— thumbed through a copy of Introduction to Advanced Wave Translation, distracted by the occasional string of fugitive farm buildings and bitter January rain spackling glass. He felt like a limp teddy bear, one that a child had dropped into a puddle and left soiled and sodden. Hangovers had become an extended affair now, with the ghost of festive indulgences lingering well into the New Year. Staring across the listless countryside, hand quavering above the textbook page, he wondered if he really wanted a part of all this. He felt weak, dizzy. Maybe it was the movement of the train or the darkening sky warping his perspective. Or maybe it was the dreariness of sucking mud and ragged sockets where trees had been ripped from the ground to make way for farmland. H— looked to the horizon to steady his nausea, but there, hovering over distant factory stacks and cooling towers, he sensed the outline of glass cubes, endlessly replicating. He was overworked and had not rested enough over the Christmas holidays as he should have. With his finger, he traced the outline of a cube on the front of his textbook.  

A certain feeling of wrongness pervaded everything. On the news they would call each new horror a “crisis”, but that implied a temporary deviation from normality, one that had a beginning and an end. But now any period of stability felt like a false flat, that section of the hill a cyclists encounters which at first looks horizontal but is actually an optical illusion. It is simply part of a steeper climb. Every day he tried to downplay the suffering he saw around him, not because he didn’t care, but because he feared they stood on the precipice of things much worse to come. 

He rubbed his eyes, considered eating one of the sandwiches he’d brought for the trip to steady his nerves, but the thought of the processed meat made his stomach clench and chose instead to wallow in nausea and fatigue.  P— was not fairing much better. He sulked silently on the seat opposite, woollen coat pulled around him, his left eye, blueblack and swelling by the minute. In his hand, he held a penknife. The blade was blunt now, but P— was never without it, constantly running his thumb over the engraving of a rose, once painted gold but now merely a gouge in the plastic red handle. Tomorrow marked the beginning of their second term teaching at the Institute. It wasn’t ideal, but jobs were scarce, and those in academia even more so. P— had barely spoken all journey, his silence was grating, loud and tedious. H— considered trying to talk some sense into him. Just because P— and this woman had exchanged pink slips a few times didn’t mean he had any avenue for recourse with the authorities. Besides, how much did he really know about her? Maybe there was good reason to suspect foul play. But P— wasn’t in a mood to be reasoned with and H— did not have the energy for a fight. He was exhausted in a deep part of himself that sleep could not fix. The constant buzz of anxiety of complying with each new protocol plagued him like tinnitus. Every time he left his house, he fastidiously checked his docs. Educator’s travel permit. ID card. Train ticket. 

“You do have your permit don’t you?” H— asked.

P— pulled a face, extracted the yellow slip from his breast pocket and wafted it in front of H—’s face like a handkerchief.

“You are a bore, and now you’re the only company I have for the rest of term." P— said, wincing as he touched his split lip which had begun to bleed again.

“I suppose you’re sore about the girl?” H— asked. 

“What I want to know is how did they find out about her papers?”

“Someone must have told on her. Maybe C— or one of the men at the local office. You know what they’re like. I think sometimes they do it just for fun.” 

“Just so damn unlucky to get caught like that.”

They flew past the small town of Stockton, a dour industrial outpost isolated on the periphery of the city. Once there had been a pretty church there, with an unusual gothic spire, which, when he thought of it, always reminded him of day trips to the coast, back when he and G— used to do that kind of thing. They had knocked down much of the old town now, just the odd statue or war memorial remained. The rest of the town had been demolished to make way for arable land. Industrial farm buildings spilled over town borders, homogenising the landscape to the point he wasn’t sure Stockton even existed any more. Muntjac deer, necks warped with tumours staggered about the ragged verges, lapping at puddles of rainwater laced with fungicides.

The train stopped at a crossing just outside the town, and from where H— sat, he could see row after row of modular homes, lights glowing from curtainless windows, their residents enjoying the last of the evening before the electricity is turned off. And where the housing ended, just before a stubble of razed woodland began, there was a pile of translucent corpses, mouths streaked with silverish vomit, ready to be burned. He glanced at P—, but neither said anything. P— closed his eyes and pretended to sleep.

As darkness fell the train window became a mirror. H— ran his hands through his hair that had grown too long to comply with Institution regulations. Maybe he could borrow a pair of scissors from the porter when he got to his lodging. P—’s reflection was warped by the metal window frame. They both looked so old now. Why did things have to change? He was so tired of it. He dreamt of enjoying something simple again, like spring irises or the feeling of a conker, fresh out of its casing, in the palm of his hand. In fact, he could even be satisfied with P—’s smile, that irrepressible one when he found his own jokes too funny. He would give anything just to see him laugh again, one of pure mirth instead of cynicism. Like that time when H— had called their tutor “Mum” by mistake and she had asked them both to leave because P— was crying with laughter. 

P— drew people to him, it was his way. When he was your friend, everything felt warm and light and when he’d found someone new to play with, it was as if the sun had gone in. H— had seen new friends adopt P—’s  mannerisms, echo his world view. They all liked the wine he liked, read the books he recommended. He bent them all to his will, H— included. And it was because, in his heart, P— was a good person to be around. Most of the time. He’d never remember your birthday, but he was the friend, who during a heavy night at some casino or bar, always upstaged you so that everyone forgot the foolish thing you did. And he never judged you. There was something comforting about that. He never brought up those secret things you confessed under the haze of alcohol. Whether it was discretion or forgetfulness, who could say? It was true and P— would admit himself that he was a scatterbrain. Like when he left the penknife his little brother had given him in the library and when they went back it couldn’t be found. H— had held him on a bench in the quad while he wept, frightening, angry sobs wracking his body, the grief for his brother shaken loose. H— had laced his hands through that impossibly thick hair and held the smaller man in a bruising embrace, only witnessed by the white marble faces of their forefathers. Such an outburst in public was unthinkable now, and without privacy he’d noticed how their sense of self had begun to dissolve into the morass, as if all the colour had been sucked out of the world. And what of the kiss P— had given him, when H— triumphant and breathless, had extracted the penknife from behind the radiator in the library's study area. Maybe, like the penknife, everything lost could be found again. After the affair with G—, their mutual friends thought he’d want nothing to do with P—.  It wasn’t that he had forgiven him. He didn’t have the goodness in him for that. He simply couldn’t imagine his life without P— in it, cowardice one might call it. But they had been through it all with each other and didn’t that count for something? 

P— opened his eyes and shifted in his seat.

“By the way,” he said, tapping the textbook on H—’s lap, “You know they’ve changed the syllabus? This one’s out of date.”

“Surely not.” H— said, “That’s utterly ridiculous, we were teaching from it just before Christmas.”

“Mm, but there’s the chapter on particles which is apparently no longer consistent with providing a balanced curriculum. As per the authorities instructions. I heard from E— at the union meeting. You were invited.”

“Christ, would have been decent of them to let all of us know.”

“They don’t want us to keep up. That’s the point.”

“But how do they expect us to teach wave translation without the chapter on particles? Our science demands—”

“—a basis for statements, I know, but it doesn’t matter anymore. It’s their version of the truth that counts now. Compliance is all that is expected of us. Everything is just a test to see how much shit we’re prepared to swallow.”

“I’m tempted not to change my lesson plan, claim ignorance,” he said.

P— erupted.

“So this is what you’ll stand up for? They’re taking everything away from us. Your colleagues are being subjected to show trials and you say nothing, but as soon as they start interfering with your bloody text books, then you’re ready to break the rules?”

“And what good would it do if I rushed to their defence? They’d assume I was in on it. You’d love that wouldn’t you? You might as well move into my house now, I’m sure G— wouldn’t mind.”

“I bet she was delighted when they announced the marriage dissolutions. The best Christmas present she could have got.”

H— rubbed his forehead, the wedding ring still on his finger felt ridiculous. Anger surged through him.

“Have you been waiting to give her a pink slip? That never stopped you before.”

“No matter how hard you try to convince everyone, I know you’ll never be able to forgive me, just like she never forgave you for not giving her children,”

“What’s that got to do with anything? You said it yourself, who would want to bring children into this world? Every day, a new nightmare.”

P—ignored him.

“Of course, that would have meant you’d have had to sleep with her,” 

An angry tear rolled down H—’s cheek. He coughed, barking into his handkerchief and quickly stuffed it back into his pocket so that P— would not see the silvery mucous on the cloth. The conversation had transcended their usual back and forth. Overhead the voiceover speaker crackled. H— braced himself to hear something terrible, something that would end everything. But no voice sounded.

“Why are you so angry with me?” H— asked quietly.

“Strange isn’t it?” P— said, “That the officials knew to check the girl’s permit the day after it expired?”

“Are you suggesting I told on her?”

“Oh, I’m not suggesting it. I’m stating it.”

“Well, what if I did?”

“You want to keep me on a lead like a fucking dog, don’t you?”

“Well maybe if you’d stop behaving like one—”

At that moment, the carriage door clanked open and two inspectors walked through the aisle toward them, gripping onto the backs of seats to steady themselves. They always travelled in pairs, one senior, and one junior. In the flattening neon lights of the train carriage, they both looked the same in their starched navy unifs. Nerves crackled through H—. 

“Docs please.”

H— dove his hand into his satchel and handed over his papers to the lead inspector, a tall wiry woman with pitted skin, claggy and orange with foundation. She scanned his ID card, perforated the ticket and then turned her comms screen to face him.

“Look at the camera,”

The machine scanned his irises, then displayed “ID CONFIRMED.” Text scrolled down the screen, H—’s life laid bare. Bank accounts. Voting history. Everything about G—. Before the inspector could turn the screen back toward herself, he saw that, under the “sexual activities” section, the words “SUSPECTED L9&” were highlighted in green. He didn’t need to understand the code to know what it meant. They had taken away the words to describe it; the complexities of his most secret desires reduced to a string of characters.

The woman ran a thumbnail over her lip as she read through his record.

“It says here that you have an outstanding balance of £3880 on a loan issued five years ago.”

The loan was for G—’s mother, but her credit rating was so bad that they’d applied for it on her behalf.

“Yes, I’m on a payment plan. It was all arranged through my bank. My credit history is good, I’ve never missed a payment. It must say that there.”

“You’ll need to check in with the finance office, all outstanding debts are being called in. We’ve been alerted to a fraudulent incident at the university.”

At that moment, he was sure P— would cut in and offer to pay the balance, after all, grand gestures were his thing and it would be his way to make amends. But when H— looked to P—, he was busy unpacking the entire contents of his holdall. The other inspector was a young man with a wispy, beetling moustache and a unif too big for his frame. He folded his arms.

“This one says he’s forgotten his ID card,” he said.

“Regrettably, it seems I have,” P— stammered.

The junior inspector spoke a series of code words into the comm link on the lapel of his unif. P— opened and closed his penknife. He always did it when he was nervous. The head inspector focused in on it, looked from the penknife to his bruised face and assessed that he was trouble. Without a second of consideration pulled a taser from the holster on her belt.

“Drop the weapon.” She commanded.

“Please, it’s a keep sake, it couldn’t cut through butter,” H— said.

He expected P— would throw the knife to the ground, agree with the explanation he had just given. But instead a loud guttural sound exploded from him. It must be some seizure, H— thought. He’s sick like me. And then with horror he realised that P— was laughing. A body wracking, wheezing laugh.

“I’m sorry, my friend, he’s been under immense stress lately. In our work, we’re exposed to a lot of radiation—”

“What a beautiful country. Don’t you get the joke?” he rasped.

He must be mad, his tether had snapped. The lead inspector spoke into her comm link, calling for back up, while the other wrestled P— to the floor of the train and cuffed his hands behind his back. Even with his face pressed to the mud streaked floor of the carriage, he still made a sound akin to laughter, but it had turned into more of a strained gurgle, tears streaming down his face, though from laughter or distress, H— could not tell. The junior inspector, prising open his right hand, extracted the penknife from P—’s grip. He let out an anguished cry. A group of four inspectors in navy blue unifs swarmed the carriage. The train screeched to a halt and an emergency recording sounded from the crackling speaker. They dragged P— toward the exit.

“Will you find it again?” he shouted. “H—? I said, will you find the knife again for me?”

Outside the replicating glass cubes had formed a wall around them. All lasers were pointed toward the train.

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