The Sudden Appearance of Hope

Chapter 50

Preparation, preparation, preparation.

Police coming, no way out below, but that was fine.

Preparation, preparation, preparation.

The security office was on the sixteenth floor. I walked in at gunpoint, held three men at bay, shot out the computers, watched the screens go dark, and walked away.

Me, they forgot, though the bullets would take some explaining.

A cleaning cupboard on the eleventh floor. I chose it for the ceiling void above; especially large, to accommodate some piece of environmental apparatus they’d never got round to installing.

I broke into a vending machine and took three bottles of water, two packs of wasabi beans, and a bar of chocolate.

I lay in the ceiling void, drinking slowly, eating chocolate. I smeared yoghurt onto my face, hands, wrists, neck — anywhere which had been exposed to the fumes of tear gas. I ate the rest, waited.

An hour.

Two.

Three.

Nine hours.

A day.

Time passed, and I waited.

Police ransacked the building, and no one looked for me.

I closed my eyes, stayed on my back in the ceiling void, ate a few wasabi beans, needed to go to the toilet, counted to one hundred in the silence and the dark, and waited.

Time passed, and I waited.

Waited for memory to fade.

Wondered where Gauguin was, where Luca Evard was staying.

A cheap hotel — he always stayed in cheap hotels, even when someone else paid. Was he listening to the sound of my voice, did he have my words on repeat?

Perhaps he could cheat, write my words down a dozen times, and then a dozen more, and in doing so he would remember the act of writing, and in that way words would survive, even if the link between me speaking them and what entered his memory grew thin.

I counted to a thousand, and perhaps I slept, and when I woke, I counted to two thousand, and stayed wide awake.

And when it was done; when I reached twenty-four hours by the clock, I slipped out of the ceiling void, took the stairs down to the sub-basement, smiled at the security guard by the door. My picture, captured by CCTV, was on the wall behind him as I passed by, but his back was to it at that moment, and though he must have studied it all day, its features had faded in his mind, and he smiled at me as I walked away.