Distress

him out too soon there was the risk that he’d give Gina a less-than-satisfactory catharsis report. The details didn’t matter, he’d be allowed to keep them to himself—but he had to be able to say with a straight face that we’d kept on baring our souls right into the small hours.

I said, “You always claimed that you’d never get married. Monogamy was for the weak. Casual sex was more honest, and better for all concerned—”

Angelo laughed, but gritted his teeth. “I was nineteen when I said that. How’d you like it if I dug up a few of your wonderful films from the same era ?”

“If you’ve got copies… name your price.” It seemed inconceivable, but I’d spent four years of my life—and thousands of dollars from assorted part-time jobs—making half a dozen terminally pretentious experimental dramas. My underwater butoh version of Waiting for Godot was perhaps the single worst creation of the digital video era.

Angelo stared at the carpet, suddenly pensive. “I meant it, though. At the time. The whole idea of a family —” He shuddered. “It sounded like being buried alive. I couldn’t imagine anything worse.”

“So you grew up. Congratulations.”

He glared at me angrily. “Don’t be so fucking glib.”

“I'm sorry.” He didn’t seem to be joking; I’d struck a nerve.

He said, “No one grows up. That’s one of the sickest lies they ever tell you. People change. People compromise. People get stranded in situations they don’t want to be in… and they make the best of it. But don’t try to tell me it’s some kind of… glorious preordained ascent into emotional maturity. It’s not.”

I said uneasily, “Has something happened? Between you and Lisa?”

He shook his head apologetically. “No. Everything’s fine. Life is wonderful. I love them all. But…” He looked away, his whole body visibly tensing. “Only because I’d go insane if I didn’t. Only because I have to make it work.'

“But you do. Make it work.”

“Yes!” He scowled, frustrated that I was missing the point. “And it’s not even that hard, anymore. It’s pure habit. But… I used to think there’d be more. I used to think that if you changed from… valuing one thing to valuing another, it was because you’d learned something new, understood something better. And it’s not like that at all. I just value what I'm stuck with. That’s it, that’s the whole story. People make a virtue out of necessity. They sanctify what they can’t escape.

“I do love Lisa, and I do love the girls… but there’s no deeper reason than the fact that that’s the best I can make of my life, now. I can’t argue with a single thing I said when I was nineteen years old—because I don’t know better now. I'm not wiser. That’s what I resent: all the fucking pretentious lies we were fed about growth and maturity. No one ever came clean and admitted that ‘love’ and ’sacrifice’ were just what you did to stay sane when you found yourself backed into a different kind of corner.”

I said, “You really are full of shit. I hope you don’t take Ds at parties.”

He looked stung for a moment, then he understood: I was promising to keep my mouth shut. I wasn’t going to throw a word of this back at him when he was sober.

I walked him to the station just before midnight. There was a warm breeze blowing, and ten thousand stars.

“Good luck with Stateless.”

“Good luck with your debriefing.”

“Ah. I’ll tell Gina…” He trailed off, frowning like an aphasic.

“You’ll think of something.”

“Yeah.”

I watched the train until it disappeared, thinking: She did help me, after all. I actually forgot about both of us, for a while. And she’ll survive. And I’ll survive. And tomorrow, I’ll be on a South Pacific island… trying to bluff my way through two weeks with Violet Mosala.

Backed into a different kind of corner.

What more could I have asked for?

PART TWO

9

The living, artificial island of Stateless was anchored to an unnamed guyot—a submerged, flat-topped, extinct volcano—in the middle of the South Pacific. At thirty-two degrees latitude, it lay outside the ocean resource zones of the Polynesian nations to the north, in uncontested international waters. (Laughable ambit claims by Antarctic squatters aside.) It sounded remote—but it was only four thousand kilometers from Sydney; a direct flight would have taken less than two hours.

I sat in the transit lounge in Phnom Penh, trying to unknot the muscles in the back of my neck. The air- conditioning was icy, but the humidity seemed to penetrate the building unchecked. I thought about wandering out into the city—which I’d never seen firsthand—but I only had forty minutes between flights, and it would probably have taken half that time to obtain the necessary visa.

I’d never understood why the Australian government was such a vehement supporter of the boycott against Stateless. For twenty-three years, successive Ministers of Foreign Affairs had ranted about its “destabilizing influence on the region'—but in fact it had acted to relieve tensions considerably, by accepting more Greenhouse refugees than any nation on the planet. And it was true that the creators of Stateless had broken countless international laws, and used thousands of patented DNA sequences without permission… but a nation founded by invasion and mass-murder (acts demurely regretted in a treaty signed two hundred and fifty years later) could hardly claim to be on higher moral ground.

It was clear that Stateless was being ostracized for purely political reasons. But no one in power seemed to feel obliged to make those reasons explicit.

So I sat in the transit lounge, stiff from a four-hour flight in the wrong direction, and tried to read the sections of Sisyphus’s physics lesson which I’d skimmed over the first time. They were highlighted in accusing blue, eyeball-track analysis gallingly right on every count.

At least two conflicting generalised measures can be applied to T, the space of all topological spaces with countable basis. Perrini’s measure [Perrini, 2012] and Saupe’s measure [Saupe, 2017] are both defined for all bounded subsets of T, and are equivalent when restricted to M—the space of n-dimensional para-compact Hausdorff manifolds—but they yield contradictory results for sets of more exotic spaces. However, the physical significance (if any) of this discrepancy remains obscure—

I couldn’t concentrate. I gave up, closed my eyes and attempted to doze off—but a siesta appeared to be biochemically impossible. I blanked my mind and tried to relax. Eventually, my notepad chimed and announced my connection to Dili—picking up the news from the room’s IR broadcast a few seconds before the multilingual audio began. I headed for the security gate—and, stepping through, recalled the scanner in Manchester, extracting poetry from a student’s brain. No doubt in twenty years’ time, weaponless hijackers would have their intentions exposed as easily as any explosive or knife. My passport file carried details of my suspicious internal anomalies, to reassure nervous security officials that I wasn’t wired to explode… and maybe people who were plagued by unwanted dreams of running amok at twenty thousand meters would need analogous certificates of innocuousness in future.

There were no flights to Stateless from Cambodia. China, Japan and Korea were all pro-boycott, so Cambodia fell into line with its major trading partners to avoid causing offense. As did Australia—but its