The Network - Jason Elliot [101]
By the time she’s finished I’ve filled a dozen pages. When she leaves in the morning I rewrite them using the pen supplied to me by Seethrough and the pad of water-soluble paper that he’s shown me how to use with it. Double spaced and in capital letters. Then I press the blank sides of a twenty-page United Nations de-mining report against each page in turn, and press them together for several minutes as the invisible dye contained in the ink of my report transfers to the blank sheets. Even under a microscope, there is no physical disturbance to the fibres of the paper, and the ink is virtually undetectable using chemicals. Then I re-staple the pages, and the result is what looks like an ordinary printed document, together with a scribbled covering note, sealed into an envelope addressed to a Mr Halliday of the British embassy. I burn my original notes in the kitchen sink, then run the tap over the sheets of my finished report. They dissolve within seconds into a translucent sludge. Then I throw a single unused sheet which I didn’t need into Jameela’s waste-paper bin. It misses by a tiny fraction, and bounces from the rim onto the floor.
I wonder, now, about such things.
A piece of paper, crumpled into a ball and propelled by the force transferred by the muscles of my hand and arm, tumbles through the air. Its direction and speed is in turn influenced by the immeasurably smaller forces that act on it from the air through which it passes. The resulting momentum, partially dissipated by the metal lip of the waste-paper bin, determines its final position, a few inches from the edge of the wall under Jameela’s dresser. And this tiny deviation from its intended goal, of which the paper itself cannot possibly be conscious, prompts me to stand up and retrieve it from the floor with the intention of putting it into the bin where I had hoped it would land. But as I lean down to pick it up, something catches my eye.
On the floor tile at the base of the wall under the dresser where the paper has ended its flight is a tiny mound of white powder. It must be recent, otherwise it would have blown away or been swept away by now, and I can’t help but wonder where it comes from. It’s the kind of mound generated by making a small hole in a wall with an electric drill. I smell it. It’s plaster dust. I look up to see where such a hole has been made, bemused at the same time by the habit of my own curiosity. An oil painting hangs directly above the dresser. It’s a sample of raw but striking art from a local painter, depicting half a dozen women in brightly coloured tobes carrying pots of water on their heads. The dust, I reason, must come from the hole made to hang the painting. But this would have been made months or even years before, and no trace would be left today.
The dust, I decide, comes from a hole in the wall which is actually above the frame of the painting. I haven’t noticed it before because it’s just a few millimetres across and just above the frame. But this is the puzzling thing: the dust made by the drilling of the hole hasn’t fallen onto the frame of the painting but onto the floor instead, which suggests that the painting was removed when the hole was made. None of which would have the slightest significance, had