Peace

“Don’t come back before 5pm,” says Taraky.

Taraky’s personal assistant surveys the leaden sky. “Shall I row up at 2, just to be within reach? I’ll keep out of sight.”

Taraky draws breath to rebuke this liberty. Over Britton Hill –all sunken under the rising sea except the tree-covered summit– there’s no storm forecast today. But that’s no warranty. Forecasts have gone back to being horoscopes.

His P.A. sits facing him in the stern of the tulip-red rowboat, sculling with light, asymmetrical strokes between the pine and hickory branches tangled netlike just above and below the water. Whatshisname’s bushy brows are drawn; his lumberjack-broad back is hunched; his effort to keep the boat clear of the half-sunk trees is obvious. Taraky wonders why Whatshisname has stuck around MeditateUs for so long. A moose strayed into a herd of chamois –doesn’t he tire of not belonging?

“What will be, will be,” Taraky replies, fixing his magnetic gaze on Whatshisname, who’s still looking away. “I’ll see you at 5pm.”

Whatshisname ships his oars and studies the two pines, ten feet apart, that they’re passing between. How placid he looks: like a goat without worries or wife. He hasn’t told anybody about his wife. Taraky only found out accidentally.

“I hope my instructions are clear,” says Taraky.

If only he could remember Whatshisname’s name. Using his interlocutor’s name frequently was the first trick Taraky learned when scouting investors for his first business. Forty years on, people come and go, and Taraky still struggles with names. But the people at MeditateUs are like him: egoless. They don’t mind his anomia, they like it: it’s an individuating feature, a rocky outcrop to grip on the iceshelf of Taraky’s enigma. When, occasionally, he does remember a name, the student’s or employee’s face brightens sunflower-like –reminding Taraky life is better without expectations.

Whatshisname glances at the fishing net and the solar cooker, in the bottom of the boat, which will feed the two of them these next few days if all goes well. “5pm might be too late,” he replies, staring over Taraky’s shoulder at the half-sunk hill they’re approaching.

Taraky taps his foot. These unenlightened scruples are slowing him down. “We’re born alone, we die alone.” Whatshisname’s real worry flashes across Taraky’s mind. His brow clears. “If something happens to me, you’re all provided for. And the students will be reimbursed.”

Finally Whatshisname looks at Taraky. His eyes are like grass, gleaming with a life opaque. He touches the rim of his sunhat in farewell.

Taraky slips out in his swim-shorts and life-jacket and half-swims, half-grapples the last mile of his way. Over the half-sunk hill, the water is still, but branches entangle his ankles. The tree-trunks protruding overhead are hard to grip, half-rotten and slimy with algae from being underwater at high tide. The wiry shaven-headed 61-year-old guru is panting lightly when he gains land. He trudges the 90 feet up the gentle slope to the loblolly pine at the summit.

Clearly, PlanetWatch’s predictions about when the waters would submerge Florida’s highest point were off by months. With the whole state abandoned, they must’ve stopped tracking this datapoint, which stood just 340 feet above pre-2030 sea-levels. The yacht was motoring up from Mexico when Taraky sighted land. Now thunderclouds are piling in the middle distance. If there is a storm, and if it breaks here at high tide, then today might be the day Florida becomes the first American state to be fully submerged. 21^st March, 2081, first day of spring, bye-bye, Britton Hill.

Through his binoculars Taraky watches the tulip-red rowboat navigate the cloudy green waterjungle towards the white triple-decker yacht waiting three miles away. It was for a watersport break that Taraky claimed they’d stopped the yacht. Some of his students dropped small craft, under cover of which he tried to slip away. But they saw him. They demanded where he was going. ‘Suddenly we come,’ Taraky replied, ‘suddenly we go. We have no right to worry.’ He didn’t remind them they’d be reimbursed for the workshop if he wasn’t back. That would’ve been crude. For these are not the people who are greedy; these are not the people whose greed is sinking the ship. He drops his binoculars and pictures his students leaning over the guardrails, gossiping.

The loblolly’s roots are moss-furred, the grass around it brown and rotting. He kneels over the fragments of seashell and plastic that the grass has sieved out of the water: the lustreless confetti of world’s end. 9am. Nine hours till high tide. It’s muggy. He takes off his lifejacket and strolls around the island, surveying the scene of his possible death.

Two-dozen slash pines and longleaf pines stand fully above water on the 90 feet that remain of Britton Hill. The bases of their trunks are algae-coated, and their submerged roots must be salt-damaged. But their crowns are intact. Even with Florida’s formerly tame tides now averaging 50 feet, these pines’ branches have stood above the highwater mark. So far. South of him, Taraky has to peer over three miles of semi-submerged trees before his binoculars find a treetop that’s just crocodile-snouting above water. He settles down against the loblolly.

Finally Whatshisname is approaching the yacht, signalling All clear. In the two hours it’s taken Whatshisname to row the six-mile round trip, the other small craft have left the water. Now against the yacht’s white cheek the rowboat glistens red as a pimple. Soon the yacht will be gone to Georgia, and the rowboat will be gone too, waiting just out of Taraky’s sight. Perhaps he’ll never see either vessel again. His hand gropes his swim-trunks for his mobile-phone, but of course he’s left that back on the yacht. This would mean nothing if he had the means to call for help. It’s just hunger, he tells himself, this sinking in his stomach. The swim has whetted his appetite.

Cormorants perch on slime-green branches, their glossy black wings fanned out to dry. Terns swoop low, coasting beady-eyed. Just under the surface, fish capture and concentrate the daylight’s faint silver. These arboreal shallows must be flush with organic matter: rich feeding grounds, but easy to get trapped in. The wind blows hot from one direction, cold from another, drops dead, then resurrects itself. The sun gives up its struggle against the clouds.

There: he was just hungry. His stomach rumbles frankly now. He would’ve needed plastic, or one of the also problematic substitutes for plastic, to bring food. He renounced packaging decades ago. He doesn’t preach, but he mustn’t be a part of the problem.

He peers after the shrinking white speck of his yacht. By dawn they’ll be at the Appalachian foothills, enjoying the scenery their workshop fees help preserve: an estate belonging to a friend, a former Silicon-Valley colleague who’s still got her head up her own backside, neck-deep in tech, a blue-piller who’ll still be grasping at gold when the rubbish mountains landslide over her. He pictures her leading his students through her fifty-acre oasis where the caplilies still bloom and the boxturtles slog. That’s the nearest land, 270 km north. If all goes well, they’ll be back in four days to pick up Whatshisname and Taraky.

Now he can acknowledge, now that everyone is beyond signalling: it’s not hunger that’s churning his stomach. It’s the animal –still undisciplined, afraid. If the storm breaks, he’ll hold on to the pines, or swim clear of the sunken forest and tread water till Whatshisname comes for him at 5pm. No big deal. Taraky once swam 100km from Maloy to Floro up the Norwegian coast. That was fifteen years ago, in calm summer waters, and with rests. But he can still beat a professional mermaid in a breath-holding contest, and walk with a Bajau diver on the reef 200 feet below surface.

All this worrying is a travesty of the Motto. Taraky composes his face to compose his mind. Whatshisname’s goat-calm face flashes through his mind as a model.

He pictures Whatshisname opening the envelope that, in the event of Taraky’s nonreturn, each employee will receive. He pictures Whatshisname reading the figure printed on the transaction chip above the fingerprint scanner. In the unlikely event that Whatshisname compares notes with his colleagues, he’ll know his legacy is larger. He’ll realise Taraky knew about his wife. He won’t refuse the legacy. He’ll see, of course, how imperfect was Taraky’s adherence to his own Motto. But so what? After me, the flood.

He leans his head back. The loblolly’s bark is wrinkled. Deep grooves run vertically 100 feet up. The branches are crowded together in the top 30 feet. The size-zero trunk lists far northwards, its branches flailing. A ridiculous sight, making his lips purse and his breath come fast and shallow, like something designed by man. Man, the creator of deformed dogs that can’t breathe, of mice with ears on their backs, of assembly-line robots that’ll keep trying to bottle milk when all the cows are dead, of wet-nurse robots that’ll keep trying to bottle-feed infants when all the infants are dead. He isn’t angry at the trees. He’s angry at human imbecility. Through his clenched throat he forces a deep breath. He isn’t angry at anybody. It’s just the stress of being out here alone.

For this to mean anything, he must do it alone, beyond succour in an exigency. He’s done it in riskier places. Under the Delhi night sky, red with firebombs during massive communal riots; beside the last trickle of the Nile on the salt flats of what was once Egypt; on the last layer of summer ice on the Baikal, the last year that there was summer ice. Well, those times were a little different. With a final glitter of sunshine off its solar panels, his yacht vanishes.

Taraky cranes his neck into the canopy. Against the dim sky, with no light to break between them, the leaves cluster dense and grave, listening for the wind. What are those dark knots? Those fistsized bulges. Surely they’re not –it’s the wrong season, and anyway– the clouds part, the sun glowers, and his fists clench For yes, they’re cones. All the pines are bristling with cones. Cones prodigiously abundant, cones wildly out of season, cones here at world’s end.

How absurd! To go on trying to procreate, when your feet are underwater, the soil loosening from between your roots, sea salt breaching your skin. These trees are just as ridiculous as the robots he designed at ArtificeUs. It is with trees as it is with humans: business-as-usual till the water closes over your head. He pictures these last pine trees sunken too, their branches lollygagging underwater, their cones rotting as they bobble along seeking other cones. A great grief opens rift-like in his throat.

He massages his throat. “Oo-mm,” he chants. He came here on a whim, but clearly his soul needed discipline.

The suits sit at the roundtables, speechifying; companies advertise the billions they’ve invested in carbon capture; teens circulate all-caps petitions online; rallies swarm the streets, with catchy chants, and placards exclaiming rainbow slogans. His own efforts failed. Now it’s too late. There’s no sense in getting worked up. So here he is –loving life, not wanting to die, but surrendering to whatever’s coming. Why should he be exempt from the fate of all things? He’s not special. He learned that, that afternoon lying on the gurney. With the waters rising, and every man clinging tighter to the lifebuoy marked ‘Greed Is Good,’ he owes it to the earth to bear calm witness to its death.

“Oo-mm.” He surveys the horizon.

He is as alone as the pilot was, on that Boeing 973 flying from Lima, Peru to Salem, Oregon. An apoc-collector had smuggled aboard an Amazon shrew, a newly discovered species and possibly the last of its kind, pillaged from the last bit of wilderness. Who was it? Eleven years on, Reddit is still playing pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey with the passenger list. The animal must’ve gotten loose and coughed up a pathogen. Investigators surmised that everybody in the cabin lost consciousness within minutes.

After all the hijackings and arsons and other end-of-times pranks, 973s were designed with airtight cockpits. The pilot heard the screaming, the shouting, the banging on the cockpit doors –then radio silence. But he was over water. He did his duty: he masked himself and flew on. He kept requesting passengers to fasten seatbelts, directing crew to serve meals, joking with his AI copilot over the intercom. He landed, exited through the cockpit, and turned himself in to quarantine.

With emergency-response services perpetually overstrained, and the comsats in and out of service, courtesy the ongoing dispute between world governments and the emulator-controlled estate of the cryo-sleeping Elon Musk –the Boeing contamination was mishandled. The shrew escaped. All across the western states, millions of people, fleeing forest fires, hurricanes, and civil war, were huddled in refugee camps. The infection decimated them. The Old Americans, who’d been protesting this migrant invasion, survived behind their high walls and their windows that never open. Turns out all they had to do was wait for everyone infected to die. This deadly virus could survive only minutes without a live host.

Any schmuck could’ve survived like that. It’s the pilot Taraky admires: keeping his head, doing what he’d come to do, walking away untouched.

The cold wind slaps Taraky’s cheek. He reaches for his life-jacket, climbs onto the loblolly’s crown, and hangs his life-jacket off a broken limb. Something cracks. His head whips around. He sees a dark-green heap landing in the brown undergrowth 70 feet away, making the sound of a great hush. The leaves were still green, but the branch must’ve been rotten through.

He slithers down and squats on the hill’s edge, bare feet on slimy grass. The midmorning sun is cloud-obscured, the wind is napping, and the sea lies opaque and simmering like a sheet of aluminium foil stretched over a vast furnace burning at low heat. As world’s-end views go, this one isn’t bad.

He’s got here just in time. Soon the apoc-tourists will be here with their telephoto cameras, gale-stable drones, and non-satellite-dependent mobile hotspots to broadcast video selfies live, geotagged, timestamped. What planes still fly are crammed with apoc-tourists, each determined to be the first to trek up the Alps in t-shirt and shorts in midwinter; to kick up sand running across the Paraná’s two-mile-wide dried-up riverbed; to sail across the 300-square-mile Lake Mazd dug, in the middle of the Arabian desert, at a cost 2,000 times the annual budget of Ethiopia two countries away –and to do all this in the eyes of the world. For only that way is anything ever meaningful.

Taraky’s lips purse into a pig-snout and his shoulders tense, squeezing the sides of his neck into the beginnings of his old headache, back when he laptopped all day. He shakes his neck loose. This isn’t anger. He has lost his anger. “Oo-mm!”

In his ArtificeUs days he’d get furious –over news, over project delays, over nothing– his fury a fire feeding and devouring itself. Now he knows that your peace is always there, the clear blue sky behind the storm-clouds. You just have to open your fists, release the balloon-strings, and watch those storm-clouds float away. Apoc-collectors, apoc-tourists, blue-pillers –everyone can do exactly what they like. That is the wise and wonderful creed of liberalism.

For now, he has this place to himself, to do what he needs to do, to do it for himself alone. For only that way is anything ever meaningful. And the most meaningful thing of all is to find peace in the face of death. He’s settling down in lotus pose when there’s splashing to his left.

200 feet away, between the branches of a half-submerged hickory tree, a tern hovers over the water. The bird’s snow-white wings flap rapidly. Something silver flashes in its flame-orange beak. Taraky uncrosses his legs and inches forward for a better view. The bird struggles over the bobbing waves. Through his binoculars Taraky sees a mullet almost half as big as the tern. The fish thrashes valiantly, drenching the bird in seaspray and half-rotted pine needles.

He’s up, sprinting, looking for a stone to chuck at the bird. He catches himself. He sits down, hands under his butt, butt crushing his hands, hands clenching under butt. He watches.

The tern subdues the mullet long enough to fly up with it. Low and awkward it flies, the heavy fish struggling in its beak. It perches on a pine-root twenty feet behind Taraky and drops the fish. The fish flops over. It leaps as if to scout its way back to the water, leaps only an inch or two, trapped between pine-roots. The mullet’s beak darts at its eyes, its own eyes shut against the slapping tail. Sweat streams down Taraky’s face. He could still do it: shoo the bird, carry the flailing fish back into water. It’s a braveheart of a fish. It deserves to swim amidst Florida’s last pine-cones bobbling on the sea.

The mullet stops leaping, lies staring, its gouged eye-sockets bloody, its body still faintly palpitating. The tern begins gobbling the flesh. Other birds circle overhead, swooping low. The tern mouths the fish and takes flight.

Taraky’s neck cranes. The tern’s snow-white body gleams against the storm-black sky, its beak and feet flashing flame-orange. The mullet’s guts spill out and cling on to the bird’s beak. The fish mouth, gaping wide, screams noiselessly. How wonderful to be dying, to feel, with your last breath, this world, which you forsook, finally avenging itself on you.

The breeze is freshening. The storm is coming. Taraky consults the sky. It must be around 10:30. He assumes lotus pose, checks one last time that he’s alone –no red rowboat pimple on the leaden sea– and shuts his eyes.

“Oo-mm,” he intones.

After six repetitions, the sound of ‘Om’ makes his folded knees twitch. After eleven repetitions, ‘Om’ becomes an echo from a living cave, which could mean anything from ‘I love you’ to ‘The oil-spill shine of your hair in the noonday sun makes my flesh creep.’ After thirty repetitions, ‘Om’ becomes a sound producible only by an alien’s mouth, meaningful only in an alien’s fractal brain. Yet somehow it’s him making the sound, him hearing it, so what does that make him? His mind wobbles. The world topples. After fifty repetitions, ‘Om’ is a cat’-o-nine-tails whipping him into submission, a slave in the salt-mines. After eighty repetitions, ‘Om’ becomes God and he pleads with it: see, I am subdued. I am a 21^st-century Buddha and this loblolly is my peepul. Please, God, enough now. After 120 repetitions, his mind is levitating over his body and he can see it. He has become separate from his mind. After 200 repetitions, he is at one with ‘Om’ and ‘Om’ is at one with the world.

At last he has it. Absolute surrender. The truth of the Motto ripples over his skin in wave after wave, up his shoulders, neck, and scalp, making his hair stand on end.

It was when he was lying in the E.R. corridor, hovering all afternoon between life and death from a stroke at 29, that the truth struck him. Nothing, he realised, could save him. Not his IQ; not the fully autonomous subsumption robots ArtificeUs had designed for the Ambani-II Mars colony; not his veganism; not his inbox, full of unanswered emails from trillionaire blue-piller venture capitalists; not his reclaimed-bamboo home furnished with driftwood; not all the unfinished projects that he’d cast out as grappling-ropes to keep going up and up. The country was under its first and only socialist government: no special treatment that afternoon for VIPs, hundreds before him on the triage list: victims of landslides and muggings, collapsed buildings and forest-fires. Those hours of limbo were the best thing that could’ve happened to the long-haired, silver-tongued, coke-and-Coke-fuelled ostrich with his head in the sand.

His body paralysed, parts of his mind dead, maybe forever, he might’ve concluded, had he been a fool, that the answer lay outside: in building sanctuaries for vanishing species, or monuments to himself. But he was no fool. Not after the chicken. What he concluded, therefore, in his life’s second great epiphany, that afternoon on the gurney, was that you cannot even control your mind, your body. That the answer lies deeper inside.

Lying there, half-vegetable, the surrender of everything but inner peace was a necessity. To make that surrender wilfully now is his ultimate triumph. So Taraky repeatedly recreates, all over the world, his helpless terror of that afternoon 32 years ago.

“Oo-mm,” he chants.

His eyes flutter open. He shuts them. They reopen. He fidgets and frets, then surrenders. So! Today will not be one of those days when he levitates in a trance over the earth for hours that feel like years. So be it. Fighting to drift is like fighting to float. He accepts this sublunary peace.

“Oo-mm,” he sings. And into his mind, disarmed by peace, it rushes.

His brother didn’t want to take him. He insisted, at tantrum-point, on tagging along. It was a backwards country their father, the armed peacekeeper, was stationed in when Taraky was five. Shamelessly the shop stood, open-fronted on the main road, the stacked cages stuffed with creatures shit-covered, blind, patchy-feathered. The man reached into the top cage, the VIP cage. This bird Taraky recognised from his primer. A chicken. Flailing, pecking, squawking, its voice breaking, like a circus-clown’s bicycle-horn blowing, like a human screaming. The world grew black around the chicken so white. The man pulled the skin off at one go, feathers and all –or did he hallucinate that? He wrenched his hand from his brother’s, sprinted home, locked himself up, sobbed himself feverish. His mother pleaded with him through his bedroom door. He clamped his ears. They’d lied to him all this while about where food came from. They were murderers. They’d made him one too. He stuffed his shorts into his backpack, and his toy panda. He would run away, make his own kingdom, make everyone stop eating chicken. At midnight he crept from his room. The front door was locked, the house dark, his family sleeping. His stomach rumbled. After a heroic struggle he sat slumped at the kitchen table in the dark eating cold chicken. His sobs were exhausted, his ears determined never again to hear another scream. With a heroic effort he put away his chicken, half-eaten. And his first epiphany worked itself into his quickly closing heart: the only thing you can control is what you do: your mind, your body. He quit speaking to his family, quit meat, buried himself in computers, and ran away on his 11^th birthday.

It judders through him in a flash, this day which he’s been trying for 56 years to forget. The storm sucks him up into its black heart, memory churns him around its maelstrom, lightning ignites him star-bright and spews him out as ash over the sinking hill. Death has come at last, fittingly in white lightning rending the black sky.

His eyes fly open. The storm is still far away. He’s still sitting on the hill, gasping.

Anger scars over his split-open soul. He laboured through all those Oms but his peace came only for an instant, treacherously bringing memories of another life . He’s been meditating for 32 years and he’s still a novice. That’s the reason for his restlessness. The only reason. It’s this restlessness that prevents him from progressing as a yogi.

How can you do something so long and still be so bad at it? He pictures gym-goers trundling away, year after year, never losing a pound; graying artists still dabbling every morning, never winning even a local contest; blue-pillers building their house of cards. It’s too easy to deceive people: that’s what makes him angry. No, not angry. Just puzzled, that the skill in patter, that he developed when hunting investors for ArtificeUs, works also on people who’ve quit that whole scene. And has he not, himself, worked harder on convincing people that he’s good, than on actually becoming good? He’s even made an asset of his limits as a yogi. He teaches his students the first steps, sympathises with their struggles to sit still –his own struggles, still every day– then tells them that anyone who offers to lead them any further is a fraud, that the rest of this trip into their own minds must be solo. And they believe him.

He stretches his arms on his knees and shuts his eyes. He’s sitting on the last layer of summer ice on the Baikal; beside the last trickle of the Nile on the salt flats of what was Egypt; under the Delhi night sky red with firebombs. Against the graybrown of an Indian midsummer night, fitfully lit by missiles, building-sized plasma-screens glow with ads for the latest treadmill, private jet, or lipstick. He’s sitting in lotus pose. Around him in a semicircle sit a few dozen students in lotus pose. These red-pillers have abandoned consumerism, paid small fortunes for flights through the airspace of nations at war, and cultivated his Motto. They sit with their backs to the neon billboards of the blue-pillers, for whom the earth is only something to consume, someplace to consume. ‘If you can find peace here,’ he tells his students, as a missile flies overhead, knocks down the electric-pole, and starts a fire that reddens the blackness inside their closed eyelids, ‘then you can find it anywhere.’ As the heat grows, and the yellow-white explosions approach, he watches his students’ eyes remain closed. He watches them embark, each alone, on the only journey that matters. And his own eyes keep fluttering open. And his own peace eludes him.

He fools them, but he can’t fool himself. He knows that watching out for them is not why peace eludes him. When, finally, he leads them away to shelter, always he prays that this, tonight, might be it. A stray bullet in the neck: so easy. What else does he deserve, him for whom the earth’s destruction is only something to test his peace, someplace to practice his peace?

On these trips that he leads, nobody is allowed photos or videos, selfies or panoramas. Everybody signs a pledge promising never to talk about this trip. They baulk at his rules but then they understand. Many of them are reformed apoc-tourists. The jump from the no-photo-not-real mindset to Taraky’s rules is such a polar jump that, perhaps, it’s no jump at all.

But why do they trudge after him, risking their lives? Why haven’t they seen through him?

“Oo-mm.” He isn’t angry at his students for being gullible. He’s angry that he, their teacher, is still a novice, that life is unfair. “Oo-mm.” He isn’t angry at all. “Oo”–

His voice is torn from his mouth, the air is torn from his lungs, and he’s flung down and battered into the ground. He struggles onto his hands and knees. He’s knocked back down on his side. The gale whips his eyes. Sand grains and tree bark and seaweed slash his face. Flat on his front, eyes squeezed shut, he crawls towards where the nearest tree must be, the tree he was just sitting under. His hands shield his eyes. Something whips by, bashes his lip, cuts it open. The blood runs warm down his chin for an instant. Then the wind snatches the blood away. His groping hands find something solid and upright. Here’s the tree.

His hands grasp the tree trunk. The lines of his palms saran-wrap themselves against the grooves of the bark. Something bashes the back of his scalp, the same something that broke his lip. His forearms find the trunk and grasp it, their muscles wriggling, pulling him forward as the wind pounds him into the ground. His upper arms find the tree. He clings on. The blood drips warm from the back of his scalp onto his bare neck, skips over a patch of skin, then drips again warm down his bare back. Grabbing on to the tree trunk with all of one arm and shoulder and his throat, he gropes with his other hand around his neck. He finds the blood-soaked strap. One eye squeezes open. Sure enough, it’s his binoculars that’ve been bashing his lip and scalp: the right lens is bloody. He eases the strap over his stinging scalp. He’s laying the binoculars down when the wind snatches them from his hand. Through half-closed eyes he watches them fly away. He passes his free arm back around the trunk, eyes shut, head down.

Something massive falls on his head. His hands reach for his head but fall by his sides. He’s flying through broken branches and chair-legs and fish tossed into the air, alive and gaping. He lands on his feet, the water behind him lapping at his calves. The storm pauses. He knows he should run forward uphill. He’s dizzy. He just needs a little rest. He falls backwards.

A small fall, onto the half-sunk netting of branches, suspended there, the water strangely calm. Languidly he opens his eyes. A great wall of purple-black cloud revolves around an emerald-green sky. The wind whips the cloudwall, the netting of branches heaves and parts, and he’s plunged fifty feet underwater. His ears buzz. Air trickles from his nostrils though he’s trying to hold his breath. His blood pounds. His body is imploding. He’s engulfed in a mass of tree-limbs, cinder-blocks, corners of sheet-roofs, intact Bakelite dinner-plates, and raincoats unfurling in slow motion, all churning together around him in the cloudy water. He peers up. The surface looks miles away and the green sky is blackening. Far above him something white is bobbing on the waves. A tern. Half-unconscious from his headblow, the water crushing him, nitrogen accumulating in his blood, intoxicating him, Taraky watches the languor growing to fill his mind, one second growing to fill an hour.

It’s his tern, of course, floating up there, the one that killed his mullet. It’s floating on its side. Dead. He reaches up towards his tern, so white, towards his chicken, towards Costas.

Costas. That’s his P.A.’s name. Costas the orphan, Costas the misfit moose, Costas who’s devoted to his wife and children but always finds time to hang around Taraky. But he never asks Taraky for anything, not even for his wisdom, for which far cleverer people pay small fortunes. Taraky doesn’t struggle with names. After his stroke he detached himself and just stopped paying attention. But not entirely. He knows Costas’s wife has cancer. He knows they can’t afford treatment. With cancers multiplying, and droughts and tsunamis and wars disrupting supply-chains, drug prices have skyrocketed. Costas was too proud to tell anyone. Taraky found out. He wanted to donate the money anonymously. He wouldn’t have missed it. He’s got enough from ArtificeUs and MeditateUs to sponsor ten nuclear power-plants, twenty wildlife-captive-breeding programmes, camps for thirty million refugees. For he’s saved all his money, for there’s nothing he wanted to spend it on. He had the money to help Costas. But he clung to his Motto. The dead tern floats far above him. Languor lulls him. The throbbing at the back of his head stills. He, with his unspent millions: he didn’t deserve death by lightning-flash. This is the death he deserves: , his body and mind, so long so proudly separate from the madding world, joining the great brown mush of Florida’s flotsam.

How wonderful to be dying, to feel with your last breath this world, which you forsook, avenging itself on you.

He’s holding his breath, gazing up at the tern –when it quivers. His half-closed eyes widen. Surely that was just a trick of the light? The tern shakes its wings and rights itself. It flaps its wings, flies up, lands a few feet away, and leaves the surface again with a great splash. Taraky reaches up after it. It’s gone.

It wasn’t random brain noise. It wasn’t restlessness. It was anger. Anger, not at the pine trees, the nurse-robots, the apoc-tourists, the tern, the mullet, at life’s unfairness that he’s still a novice, at his gullible students. Anger at himself. Always only at himself. At five years old he got wounded by the world’s pain –but he learned the wrong lesson, closed himself up, told himself there’s no sense in trying to change other people. After his stroke he sprinted further down the wrong path, substituting one idol with another, efficiency with inner peace. All his life he’s been angry, restless, eyelids fluttering. He didn’t come here to find peace. He didn’t come here, like the 973 pilot, to walk away from death’s door untouched. He isn’t the pilot, untouched by others’ misery: he’s still the little boy who couldn’t distinguish between his misery and another’s.

He came here to die.

Far above, the world glows dim and green. His gut convulses. The water crushes his empty lungs. Any second his mouth will fly open and  gulp water. He balls up tightly, the better to sink.

It smacks him in the face, cuts open his cheek, stings his skin. Reflexively he hits out at the fish that bumped into him, glares after the fish scuttling away. The electricity of a third epiphany floods him from toes to fingertips. He unballs himself and launches upwards. He swims stroke after powerful stroke, grappling from branch to branch, feet flexed clear of the flotsam.

It’s getting a little lighter. But he still can’t see the surface. His gut rolls in on itself. He fights the impulse to gasp. He pushes mightily with both feet off a sinking tree-trunk and breaks through the surface.

Rain lashes his face. The noonday sky is nightblack. He’s been underwater for four minutes but it’s not relief that floods him. It’s joy. Joy in this world, this terrible beautiful world. It’s not too late. He can deserve to live. We’re not born alone and we don’t die alone and there’s every sense in getting worked up. He will give Costas the money. And all his students, pretending not to see through him, trudging after him risking their lives? They, too, have been chasing death. Them, too, he will save. He looks up and sees, against the green-blackness, a blacker blackness. The loblolly at the summit of Britton Hill is falling towards him.

He dives. The loblolly crashes into the water. Great waves push him down. He swims clear, swims up again, and throws his arms around the loblolly. Lightning splits the sky.

The flash shows him all the world, clear for one second. From the after-image burned into his retina he parses the scene. The storm is moving but he cannot guess which way. He’s lost all his bearings. The sea has almost engulfed the summit. The loblolly lies where it fell, most of its trunk over water. Several other pines that were standing minutes ago have been uprooted. It’s all he can do to hold on to the loblolly. His arms begin to shake. He pictures his life-jacket floating miles away.

The storm is now directly overhead. All across the green-black sky lightning darts out in snake’s-tongues. Lightning strikes him and blinds him.

When he can open his eyes again, he sees it’s not him that’s been struck but the nearest tree that’s still standing. As he watches, the tree is struck again –once, twice, thrice. It catches fire. And by its own light as it burns he sees it’s a slash-pine, shedding cones like tears. Now the thunder falls, churning the sea, smashing through his ribcage, pulping his heart, shattering his eardrums. He screams in agony, clutching at his ears, losing his grasp on the loblolly. He feels himself screaming. His teeth are snapping down, his jaws gaping wide then grinding down, trying to undeafen himself. He screams and can’t hear his own screams.

Thighs numbing, arms growing heavy, ears bleeding and buzzing, he finds the loblolly and clings on with the strength of his third epiphany, his vision of the true relation between himself and the world.

Time passes. The storm rages on. He hangs on, barely conscious.

Lightning flashes close by. He ducks, waiting for the thunder. Then he looks up. He sees another light, faint but steady. A flashlight, circling over the water, lurching. The light approaches. Someone shouts something loud enough for the ghost of a sound to break through Taraky’s near-deafness. A piece of flotsam tulip-red hovers for an instant then vanishes behind a wall of water.

“Costas,” Taraky screams, so loudly that he feels himself, though he can’t hear himself, instantly losing his voice. “Costas,” he screams hoarsely. Why’s Costas still here, why hasn’t he rowed away to safety? “Costas, I was wrong, I was all wrong,” Taraky screams. “She’ll be okay.Tell me you’ll take the money. She’ll be okay!”

Maybe Costas hears him. Maybe he replies. Peering through the rain he sees Costas, temples bleeding, dead leaves plastering his cheeks, lashed by the waist to the rowboat, which is shipping water. Costas is waving, shouting, holding something up. Taraky understands. Costas is 300 feet away, can’t come any closer. “Yes,” Taraky shouts back.

Costas stands up, his feet planted wide, something in one hand, the other arm drawn back. The boat lurches, Costas is thrown backwards, something flies towards Taraky, and the boat disappears behind another waterwall. Time freezes as Taraky squints into the darkness. At the last instant he sees the lifebuoy flying right at his face. He ducks underwater and loses hold of the loblolly. Another great wave batters him. The wave that jostled the rowboat is sweeping Taraky away from the loblolly, away from his lifeline, down into the pitch-black water.

He swims upwards, breaks through the surface, and swims towards Costas screaming his name. Costas, still moored to the boat, lies slumped against the stern, his forehead cut open, the blood purple-black in the lightning. Looking wildly around, Taraky sees the solar cooker is missing. Costas didn’t tie it down properly. He’s a novice with boats, but he insisted on being the one who’d stay back for Taraky. It must’ve been the cooker flying out the boat that knocked Costas out.

“Costas,” Taraky screams. He can’t get back in without Costas steadying the boat. Another wave sweeps through them. Taraky clutches on, his fingernails whitening, the swaying boat wrenching his shoulder. He can see no end to the storm and he wonders whether he’s lost his chance to set things right, whether his pursuit of peace has killed his best friend.

Taraky flings water in Costas’s face, jogs his arm, punches him in the gut. Costas opens his eyes languidly and coughs. More shouting, more chafing, and then Costas is able to throw his considerable weight against the side of the boat, to let Taraky climb in.

“You haven’t lost the oars,” shouts Taraky, still deaf, “a miracle.” Taraky smiles and struggles not to go back to sleep.

Taraky checks Costas’s mobile-phone. It blinks on inside its waterproof casing. There’s no signal. He pockets the phone and begins rowing away from the storm, towards where Georgia must be, 270 km away. The storm is drifting after them and his consciousness is drifting out of his body and Taraky fights with all he’s got to keep rowing.