The Ministry for the Future

the shores of the Zurichsee, mostly the eastern shore. Sometimes he would feel an urge to see women’s bodies, a useless and hopeless urge, but since it could be indulged in this city, he would go to Tiefenbrunnen park on the lakeshore, pay at the gate and go in and sit down by the water and try not to be too obvious as the topless women walked by him going in and out of the lake, Swiss women so stolidly Swiss in their voices, so gorgeous in their pale skin wet in the sun. It was a bit much, a bit too clear what he was up to, and he saw also the other single men sitting around “just by coincidence,” not looking at anyone and yet undoubtedly there to drink in the sight of so many women’s bodies, no, it was too obvious, too much in several different ways, and after a while he would leave and wander the streets of the neighborhood behind the lake. There was a house there that had been turned into a small art museum, apparently the house owner’s personal collection, now open to the public. Some of the greatest paintings he had ever seen were just hanging on the walls of an ordinary little house. Or walk up along the shore to the bridge that spanned the lake’s outlet, where the Limmat left the lake, always interesting to look at, that first dip and pour in the black sheet of water. Swans floated under the stone wall just east of this bridge, the wall dropping direct from park grass to lake surface, the swans hoping for children to throw bread crumbs down to them. Unearthly, incandescent white birds, floating on black water. Or over to the little park where the statue of Ganymede held his arm up against the distant Alps.

Other days he would walk the trails around the top of the Zuriberg, over to the cemetery where James Joyce was buried— a life-sized bronze statue of the writer, always ready for a silent conversation, sitting there reading his bronze book through round bronze spectacles which nicely emphasized his near-blindness, a bronze cigarette held on his bent bronze knee. The tall trees on the Zuriberg were mostly clear of underbrush, and one could leave the dusty trails through the trees and wander among them, looking for nothing. Distant views of the Alps, better from up here than down in the city. The peaks farthest south were snow-capped and looked completely vertical, like cardboard cut-out mountains at the back of a stage set. Then through the trees to the path circling the top of the hill, and onto one of the steep residential streets dropping into the city proper. Past his secret garden shed, down through houses with their tiny yards, often with statuary in them; a big naked concrete woman held a green looped hose over her extended arm, reminding him of the casual women at Tiefenbrunnen.

Or of Syrine. Syrine and her little girls Emna and Hiba. How he regretted all that, his inability to hold it together, to be there for them. He couldn’t think about it. Miserable at the thought of it. But he still couldn’t avoid obsessing about what hurt him. Something was broken in his head. He wanted to get better but it didn’t happen. He wanted to go back to working with refugees, though it would have to be at a different center, not the one where he had met them. That wouldn’t be a problem, there were many of them in the region, but when he tried one, he realized it was just reminding him of how badly he had fucked up with Syrine and the girls. Just another trigger. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t the same place, because they were all the same place really. Always the same place, always the same day.

So, down to the Utoquai schwimmbad, where you could rent a locker and suit up and step down into the lake itself, and go for a swim until you were too cold to think, too cold to feel. Then get out and shower and have a kafi fertig afterward, a drink that would indeed finish you, but in a good way.

And yet always he was hiding. Always he felt sick and broken. There was no way to ignore the surveillance cameras mounted almost everywhere. Not that Jacob Salzman was being looked for, apparently. Someone had posted a map of all the cameras in the city, supposedly, but there were newer cameras that were much smaller than the previous ones. The bigger ones were there to remind you that you were under surveillance, whereas the smaller ones were there to surveil. So it didn’t make much sense to avoid the bigger ones, because surely everyone was always surveiled all the time. Quite possibly every human alive had a team of little drones following them. That was the only hope, in a way, in terms of lying low: that there were too many people to follow, too much data. And good reason by now to feel that he was not presently flagged as being of interest. He had his ID and his legend, and unless what had happened to him in his youth made the authorities look for him again for some reason, he should be okay. And he had not been that person for many years. Six or seven years. No, nine.

So he wore hats, and sunglasses, and grew a beard; and sometimes put a mouthgard in his mouth when out, and wore different kinds of clothing. He tried to be four distinctly different people for the cameras, with the one that was really him the least often at large. See if the algorithms could sort that out; and given the eight billion people they were tracking, it seemed possible he could slide under the radar. In any case he had to walk around, had to get out into the city. He couldn’t hide