The O.D. Read online

  Mara: But everyone thinks you’re in Ecuador.

  Bradingbrooke: I’m not in Ecuador. I’m here.

  Lavery: But we’re the only ones who know that.

  Mara: You can’t just−

  Bradingbrooke: I’m the only person on this island who knows what it feels like to have a price on his head. To be a wanted man.

  Lavery: Yes, and we want you more than they do.

  Mara: We need you, Henry. Don’t be foolish.

  Bradingbrooke: Foolish? This isn’t a foolish decision. I’ve wrestled with it for months and keep arriving at the same conclusion. For the sake of our Island’s moral integrity and long-term credibility, it’s a sacrifice that needs to be made.

  Lavery: Eydos is a consensual democracy, Henry. We’d have to put it to a vote. I doubt very much if it’ll pass.

  Bradingbrooke: Then I’ll invoke my right to leave the island without ostracism or hindrance. I’m going.

  Billy: You can’t do that, mate. It –

  “Let him talk,” Pilot interrupted. “He might have a point.”

  Bradingbrooke’s intention to surrender himself to The Hague was heatedly debated for two weeks. Everyone except Lonnie Pilot had been against it to begin with. The worst case scenario was life in prison. That was the future Bradingbrooke would be choosing. Their need for him on the Island far outweighed any ‘purification’ of Eydos’ good name such an action might effect, they argued. Pilot took the opposite view. His stance, which many thought ruthless and cold, had not endeared him to his compatriots.

  “Every cause needs a martyr,” Bradingbrooke argued. “Six of us knew in advance about the catastrophic upheaval that was to come. Obviously, we can’t all give ourselves up to the International Court. That would rip the heart out of Eydos. I’m the most expendable.”

  “What would you gain?”

  “Nothing. The gain would be yours.”

  “But negligent genocide? They’ll throw the book at you.”

  “The only people who were negligent were those who died,” Pilot said. “That will be the basis of Henry’s defence. We’ve been talking with an English barrister and he’s confident Henry will get no more than a few years, if not acquittal.”

  “I’m willing to take my chances,” Henry said, closing the matter.

  The plan was to fly Bradingbrooke to St. Hellier on the mail helicopter. Using a false passport, he would then travel to The Hague by train and present himself at the doors of the Vredespaleis. On his day of departure, everyone gathered at the helipad to wish him well. Some were in tears. Others tried to keep the mood upbeat. Pilot was the last to say goodbye. He placed his friend in a bear hug that lasted a full minute, then stepped back and looked Bradingbrooke in the eye. Neither man said a word. Enough had been spoken on the matter, which was now out of all their hands.

  “What do you think’s going to happen to him?” someone said as the helicopter disappeared into a low cloud. “What’s going to happen to us?”

  “Henry will be just fine,” Lavery said. “We’ll be fine. Let’s just carry on our work here and see what life throws our way.”

  What life threw their way next was going to be one of the toughest tests Pilot would face. Late one night, lying in the damp warmth of post coital bliss, Lavery took her lover’s hand and placed it once again on her small, perfectly formed bosom.

  “Give me twenty minutes, Janey,” Pilot said, still breathless.

  “No… not that, love.” She took his forefinger and directed it into the soft flesh of her breast. “Feel this.”

  PART THREE

  XVIII

  Pilot had wasted no time in getting Jane to Dublin’s foremost cancer hospital for a double mastectomy and the first of many courses of chemotherapy. During the eight weeks spent in Ireland for the operation and initial treatments, they stayed incognito in the very house Josiah Billy had offered up as a base for their Utopian experiment. Between treatments, the couple would return to Eydos, where Jane worked the gardens and hydroponic growing tents with as much heart as her diminishing energy levels would allow. After two years, she could do no physical activity at all, and had bravely passed control of the food production programme to her deputy, Paola Rendina.

  Over the course of the illness, the bond between Lonnie and Jane deepened, though they both knew it was an oncological inevitability that their connection would soon be severed. Jane had fought the disease with humour and resolve, supported by Lonnie and her close friends, Paola and Macushla, but four years, two months, eight days, five hours and sixteen minutes since she first got the results of her biopsy, Jane Lavery took her last breath. In one sense, her partner stopped breathing at that moment, too. He had just had his 31st birthday. And he had had enough.

  Lonnie Pilot was becalmed in the Bay of Biscay. Everyone knew it. His eyes remained lifeless, and the laptop which he used to fill daily with ideas and observations remained switched off. He would walk out with a tent and be gone for days, returning in no better frame of mind than when he had left. Words didn’t seem to help, so, on the first anniversary of Lavery’s death, one of the unattached females took it upon herself to try a physical approach to healing. “I appreciate what you’re trying to do, Darrell,” Pilot had told her. “I’m not ready, though. Not for that.”

  Eydos herself was merely treading water in a sea of increasing turbulence and instability. The more energic and committed islanders did what they could to keep the Big Idea on course, but without Pilot’s leadership it had become no more than a vague notion.

  No one was more worried about the situation than Forrest Vaalon. And when Serman reported that Pilot had decided to resign and cede leadership to anyone who would have it, a radical solution was called for. Vaalon immediately tracked down Jennifer Springs, now one of England’s most successful artists, and commissioned her to paint the ‘Eydos Landscapes’…

  Pilot greeted Springs with the familiarity of a former lover, but none of the electricity. She looked more beautiful and alluring than ever, he couldn’t deny it, but in the five years that had passed since their last meeting, an unbridgeable chasm had opened between them. Jenny’s last three exhibitions had been sell-outs and her arc was diametrically opposed to Pilot’s trough. She was looking forward and he was looking backward. They stood in silence for a while like two people trying to recognize where they’d seen the other before. “I’m sorry about the Australia thing,” Pilot said, “but I couldn’t tell you the – “

  “The truth was out of the question. I understand, Lonnie.” Jenny took both Pilot’s hands in hers. “Forrest told me about Jane.”

  “Is that why you’re here?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “To sex me out of my funk?”

  “He’s worried about you, yes. But I wouldn’t have put it so crudely.” Jenny looked offended. “I’m also here to paint. Forrest really does want six landscapes for his ranch in New Mexico.”

  Pilot back-tracked. “I’m sorry, Jenny.”

  “Don’t be. I’ll be very busy here, even if it’s not with you.”

  “Of course.”

  “It can be therapeutic, you know.”

  “Painting?”

  Jenny thought for a moment. “And painting.”

  Pilot helped carry Jenny’s bags to her dome, wrestling with his thoughts as they walked. He needed a partner, but not just a sexual one. Six years earlier she had been the most important woman in his life, but in retrospect and in light of what had happened since, Pilot realized that his connection with Jenny had only been skin deep. He also knew that the woman who had succeeded her, and had dug so much deeper, was dead, and that life had to go on. So, why not rewind− lie down with Jenny, and see what happened? He tried to imagine the outcome, but couldn’t.

  Two days later, Pilot marched over to Jenny’s dome after she’d returned with her easel from a morning of cliff painting and invited himself in. Without preamble, he placed his hands on her shoulders, buried his face in her neck and inhale
d her familiar scent. His butterfly kisses, beginning around her ear, were soon landing on her lips. At this point, the butterfly became a ravenous animal and began devouring her mouth with single-minded abandon. Always sensitive to his lovers’ signals, Pilot was encouraged by Jenny’s. She was opening like a flower. Soon, they were sex-wrestling naked on her bed. Even after five years, neither had forgotten the other’s preferred erogenous zones, and these were being mutually attended to like a Tai Chi progression. But there were two things missing. A deeper connection and an erection. Failing to find either during twenty minutes of feverish foreplay, Pilot flopped over on his back, sweat pouring off his body, and sighed. “I’m sorry, Jenny. This just isn’t working.”

  For the next two months, Springs worked zealously on her landscapes, aided by an unusually long spell of fine weather. The day before she was to leave, she went to Pilot’s dome to offer herself to him one more time. She had to wake him up. It was 4pm.

  “Lonnie, I’ve done seven paintings. Forrest only asked for six, so I’d like to give you one. Will you come to my dome and choose?”

  Pilot unrolled himself from bed and ran his fingers through his unruly grey mop. “Jenny, you don’t have to do that.” But the intensity in her eyes told him she did. “Thank you. I’d love one of your paintings.”

  When he entered her dome, seven canvasses in various states of dryness were resting against the crates Josiah Billy had made for them with material from the dismantled prefabs. It was the first time Pilot had seen the completed paintings and he was astounded by their power and technical prowess. He thought the painting of a sediment pit work party was stunning – eight figures toiling in the long shadows of dusk with the sun poised to set behind the basin rim in the distance. Next to it was an atmospheric composition of the barge site, but with no figures. He preferred paintings that had people in them. He ran his eyes over the others− superb renditions of the island in all her moods and colours. Only the seventh painting stood out as being different, in that it was more a flight of imagination than an impression of reality. “This one reminds me of The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum by John Martin. I think I know what you’re saying here.”

  “What goes up, must come down, Lonnie. Eydos will return to the sea one day…”

  Pilot pondered the painting for another minute, its depressing weight speaking to him like a Leonard Cohen song. “I don’t think Forrest will like it, so if you don’t mind, I’ll – “

  “It’s yours. I’ll leave it here for you. My parting gift.” There was a finality in her words.

  Jenny’s departure sent Pilot into an even deeper depression. As the weeks passed, he became more and more ineffectual as a leader. Eydos was rudderless and everyone knew that Lonnie Pilot’s days as leader were over. But, before a vote of no confidence could be taken, he preempted it by calling a general meeting and resigning his leadership in less than a minute. In the ensuing election, a reluctant Aaron Serman was chosen as Eydos’ new leader, having beaten his even more reluctant opponent, Nirpal Banda. It was a situation that didn’t sit well with Forrest Vaalon. Jennifer Springs hadn’t worked, and the partner he and Ruth had originally picked for Pilot seemed as disinterested in him as he in her. Forrest Vaalon made it his next mission to find out why and surprised everyone with his first ever visit to the island.

  After a rousing speech over lunch, Vaalon asked if he could speak to everyone individually, “to gauge morale and get more than just a general picture of what’s going on here.” By the following afternoon he had canvassed everyone but Pilot, who he found moping under a cottonwood.

  “Lonnie, I saved you for last,” he said, shaking Pilot’s hand. “The future success of this experiment is resting on what I’m going to say to you.” Pilot stood up and suggested they retire to the warmth of his dome. As they walked the short distance into the settlement, Pilot wondered what revelation the man had up his sleeve. Vaalon didn’t waste time on a preamble.

  “The theory of arranged marriages can’t be faulted,” he said, “only the practice. Ruth always maintained that if the matchmakers themselves are inadequate, then you will get an inadequate match. But if they have set the right criteria, done their homework and made the correct assumptions, then that all-important affinity can be achieved. Ruth’s intuition was based on collected and stored experiences that cannot be arrived at through logic or study. Thirty of the pairings that have been made on this island are as per Ruth’s original blueprint, although for some of them it took one or two mistakes before they got there.”

  Where’s this going? Pilot thought.

  “The natural courting process doesn’t necessarily result in a good match,” Vaalon continued. “Many marriages are the product of rebound. Some marriages are the product of sexual attraction only, or don’t include sexual attraction or are otherwise just partially alive. Whatever it is that makes two people compatible is only found by luck, if at all, through conventional methods.” Vaalon reached into his briefcase, withdrew a faded photograph and handed it to Pilot. A woman in her early thirties was standing arm-in-arm with an athletic, dark-maned Forrest Vaalon. The fashion of the day had not disguised a timeless quality about her, nor deflected from the intensity in her eyes – the same eyes that had so captivated Robert Frank, Man Ray and Lee Miller. “I’d like to think there were never two more compatible people who ever walked the Earth together,” he said.

  “What is compatibility, Forrest?”

  “That’s a tough one. There’s no measure for quantifying it in our society, so Ruth had to make one up. She named this measurement climacy. Climacy includes such areas as communication, rapport, physical attraction, chemical attraction, sexual appetite, romanticism, humour and imagination. Couples can be paired as either sames or opposites, because opposites often attract, as we know. Now, if your partnership has over 65% climacy, you’ve got a good chance at a successful marriage. Ruth reckoned that she and I were 85%. An arranged marriage should work adequately, but without sparkle, below 65 down to 55, although it gets more fragile as it drops. Anything below that is grounds for divorce.

  “Your getting together with Jane was a surprise to me, but it was working well and heading towards great things. Jane wasn’t the partner Ruth and I had planned for you, though.”

  He’s going to introduce me to my future wife in a minute, Pilot thought with a mixture of fear and curiosity. “I think arranged marriages are just polite rape, Forrest, with both parties the victim.”

  “Our six candidates for leader, do you remember them?” Vaalon said, deliberately ignoring Pilot’s comment.

  “How could I forget? I was only your second choice.”

  Vaalon smiled. “I’m surprised you never asked me who the surviving four were. They’ve been here the whole time.”

  “Over the years I guessed them.” Pilot scribbled four names on his pad and handed it to Vaalon.

  “Correct names, but wrong order,” he said. “You’ve got three and four transposed. You know who we’re talking about, Lonnie, don’t you?”

  He knew damn well who she was. The only surprise would be if she felt the same about him.

  Vaalon arose and put on his Astrakhan coat. “I’ll be back in an hour,” he said. “Spruce yourself up, Lonnie. You’ll never impress her looking like that.”

  It was just before midnight when Vaalon returned to Pilot’s dome in the company of another. “I’d like to introduce you to my Number Three,” he said.

  When she came through the door, her green eyes reflecting light from behind the long black curtains of her hair, Pilot’s heart skipped. He’d always been drawn to Macushla, but he had also felt intimidated by her stunning beauty, quick mind, razor wit and superior formal education. He was no Adonis and it made him feel mediocre and unconfident. He could not see the attractions that others, none moreso than Macushla Mara, saw in him. Having worshipped her from afar for so long, it was as if Vaalon had just granted him permission to climb up and join Macushla on the pedestal he had
built for her. Whether she would take his hand and help him up was another story.

  “I told Macushla the same thing I told you,” Vaalon said before walking out of earshot of the pair.

  Pilot turned to face Mara. “And what was your reaction?” he asked her. “Over all the years we’ve been here, I’ve never picked up any signals that you might be interested in me as more than just a friend and colleague.”

  “That was my defence, Lonnie. Jane and I were extremely close, as you know. We liked the same flowers, the same music, the same literature, the same art… and the same man. She got you first, and my defence was to switch off. When Jane died, I knew I had to remain switched off until two things happened.”

  “Which were…?”

  “First, that you put Jane’s picture away− figuratively speaking. I don’t think you’ve done that yet.”

  “What’s the second thing?”

  “That you wake Snow White from her eternal sleep.” The vulnerability in Macushla’s eyes surprised Pilot. “Whether you’d even want to do that, Lonnie… kiss me awake… I have no idea. You’re completely unreadable and have been from the very beginning.”

  “That was my defence, Macushla. I didn’t want to want you, because I don’t do well with rejection.”

  Vaalon, who had been standing respectfully apart, approached them now. “Are you two willing to give Ruth her head? I honestly think she got this one right.”

  Mara, who had had a few flings, but nothing of note, and Pilot, who had had a few flings and something of note, looked at eachother in bemusement. But under their smiles – hers Mona Lisa, his Cheshire Cat− something inevitable and unstoppable was about to flower.

  Vaalon departed without fanfare or farewell the following morning, leaving behind him not only a re-energised and refocused island nation, but also the final chemistry towards forming the synergy crucial to the future success of the mission.