“Do but encave yourself”: A Response to “Companionable Spaces”

Abstract

Z adie Smith’s “Meet the President!” is the story of two children who briefly keep company with one another: Aggie Hanwell, eight, long without parents and recently deprived of a sister, after a drone struck down twelve-year-old Maud for the crime of public depravity, and Bill Peek, fourteen, also motherless, with a father high up in the Incipio Security Group, whose methods of population surveillance and law enforcement include drone strikes against little girls. The two meet on a pier in Felixstowe, England, where Aggie lives and where Bill is joining his father on an inspection. To Bill, Aggie appears “local, typically stunted, dim,” whereas he is “simply global,” or, in Aggie’s words, “from nowhere.” He objects to her description, explaining that social belonging in the real world, his world, depends on being mobile: “If you can’t move, you’re no one from nowhere. ‘Capital must flow.’ ” Aggie is headed to her sister’s laying out, but she doesn’t know the way. She is so local, it seems, that she cannot navigate even familiar paths. Melly Durham, Aggie’s informal guardian, had been guiding her (“No one knows town like Melly. She’ll say, ‘This used to be here, but they knocked it down,’ or, ‘There was a pub here with a mark on the wall where the water rose.’ She’s memoried every corner”), but now Aggie has to rely on Bill, after being spontaneously left by Melly in his care. Bill is passing the time until his father is finished at work by playing a game on a hand-me-down AG 12,