THE THIRD SUTLER

 

9.1

He doesn’t know what’s happening, the road stretches ahead of him, grey and rubbery: the desert on either side a flat stony pitch, with heat rising in waves so the land appears furred. Whitby loves this, thinks of it as a TV landscape, something known, pre-encountered. The Americans he hires work in chinos and brown boots, white or blue shirts, regardless of their status or duty. Whitby, nicknamed English, has his own style: a lightweight suit, which he sweats through. He spends his life in an office or a 4×4, subject to air-conditioning.

The problem is this: he needs core samples for a road project financed three years ago. The road doesn’t exist, but the samples should already be in boxes, logged and housed in the company stores, proof of work done. And now he’s having to collect these samples himself, three years after the fact because people are getting sticky about these details. Once he has the samples he’ll have to drive back and make sure they are stored where they would have been stored, should the project actually have gone ahead. He calls these projects gophers, as in, go-for-the-money (don’t-deliver-the-project).

He’s on the phone as he drives. ‘My concern,’ he says, ‘is that we undertook the work we were required to undertake but this appears not to have been logged.’ Silence. ‘I was looking at them this morning. Those samples are in the store.’ The person he is speaking with contradicts him, and goes against the grain of the conversation. Whitby invites him to check tomorrow morning.

‘The road? I wouldn’t know about the road. That’s out of my scope. It’s not my problem. I was contracted to undertake a geological assessment, and I’ve completed the work that was requested.’ It’s a bald-faced lie. He knows it, the person he’s speaking with knows it. HOSCO published the pre-solicitation (PS), then the specific General Procurement Notice (GPN). MasterWork-Roadways (MW-R) submitted the successful Statement of Work (SOW), and subcontracted Whitby Earth Science Services (WESS) to undertake the surveys. That’s fact. After this the whole idea becomes abstract. WESS didn’t complete the survey, because MW-R didn’t intend to build the highway, because not one person in Iraq would actually ever need to drive along the entire border with Saudi and Syria. ‘Let’s make that clear,’ he says. ‘Not. One. Person.’

Whitby catches his in-caution. You can’t speak like this on a satphone. It’s not wise. Signals bounce off the ether, travel for millennia. NASA will capture it in echoes, crawlers on Mars will forward the information to god knows who, because who knows when this is coming back at you? You have to shut your mouth these days.

Against his better judgement he has to spell it out. ‘I know how this works. OK? I know. When I worked for you we built bypasses around towns that weren’t much more than encampments, bridges over dry wadis, turns in roads that didn’t need turns.’ He needs to be emphatic. ‘You’re forgetting. I. Know.’

He decides he can’t hear the caller, the signal, he says, it’s just not there. Nope, can’t hear you. Then cancels the call. It’s a small joy to imagine that frustration. The situation doesn’t need managing, not in its entirety. He just needs to look after his own part.

Whitby drives with the satisfaction of another man’s frustration chasing after him. He likes the idea that the burn of this conversation is making someone ache. He’s had the last word. As if to confirm this finality the signal for the satphone properly dies.

And the road. On the surface it looks the same now as it did when he started. Yellow to white plates of broken stone. Something that looks like a raw landscaped lot. Running under the surface it’s a whole other story. He can take core samples here, where the schist breaks through. In one or two miles the road curls as close as it’s going to get to the Syrian border. You could take samples at any point along here because there’s just the right concentration of fossil matter and silicates and gypsum, and say they came from anywhere along the entire length.

He has to get out of his car. He has a core-sampler with him. Needs to pick a spot that’s going to provide him with enough material. He slams the door and hears it automatically lock. Which isn’t right.

This is the first thing that goes wrong.

The keys won’t work. That’s great. The key is a hard plastic button. Something about it makes him think of Sweden. The pure design of it. A black button the size of a thumb print. A man’s thumb print. You press this button and the car unlocks, the engine starts, the vehicle adjusts to the driver, seats move, lower, lengthen. Air flows and temperatures alter. You can set the audio for your listening pleasure. He likes Caruso to greet him. ‘Una Furtiva Lagrima’. He hears the music and he’s in the movie. The keys won’t work and the door won’t open.

Fantastic.

He’s in the desert, thirty-something miles from the Syrian border. His vehicle has locked him out, and it’s playing Caruso. He has to listen to it, because you have to. The way the music steps, a little up, a little down. You know exactly where it’s heading. That tender baritone and the knowledge that singing this, his final aria, caused his throat to bleed. Caruso dead at forty-eight at the Hotel Vesuvio, beloved Naples. And here, in the desert, with the ground undulating in the white heat, it just makes perfect sense. His car has locked him out, and now it’s humming to itself.

He stands in the desert. Gives the car a look of hate, turns a whole 360, and lets out a sigh as the aria starts up a third time. No choice but to smash a window.

The thing is, and now he remembers, any damage and the vehicle goes into ‘alert’. The system locks down, the alarm sounds, a signal is sent across the world, supposing a signal can be sent. Only, wasn’t that removed? The man he bought the vehicle from had made some adjustments because he didn’t want to be tracked by some CIA car dealership.

It comes to him piece by piece. Locked out. Car in lockdown. No power to the phone. By his calculation he’s sixty miles from the nearest garage. From what he remembers the closest village is actually across the border in Syria. It won’t come to that. Not yet. All you do is wait. The goddamned thing will reset itself. The alarm will have to stop sometime soon. Just leave it alone and the codes automatically reset.

He waits an hour. Sits on the road with his knees up, and his suit jacket hitched over his head. With his fingers in his ears. It’s unnerving just how bleak it is, and how can there be flies out here when there is no other living creature? He sits on the tarmac with his back against the car and hides from the sun. The car, while it provides shade, becomes much too hot. For all of the expense, those self-adjusting seats, the assisted steering, the brakes, the interface between computer and vehicle – it’s nothing more than a heat-attracting can.