The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures (52 page)

He ate that evening with
the whole group, sitting on the porch, scooping beans and fried potatoes and
hot dogs western-style, and watching the setting sun polish the distant
round-shouldered hills a startling lobster-red. He still couldn’t remember
anybody’s names, but the mood of the group was chatty, informal. “Isn’t the world
supposed to be ending in a few hours?” Hector asked nobody in particular,
loudly, after his third beer. “You’re all mighty jolly.” But his only reply was
laughter.

He only spoke to his
father for a few minutes in total that evening. “I was just wondering, Dad,” he
said, emboldened by the booze, and by the strange social environment (and with
the Bulgarian’s strange words still buzzing in his brain from earlier), “about
this Jules Verne book.”

“Yeah,” said his Dad,
looking levelly at him.

“I was just wondering. I
don’t see how it can be, you know,
real.
It’s so wacky.”

Hector senior nodded.
The Bulgarian woman’s boyfriend, whom Hector now knew, after what she had said,
was called Tom, was sitting close to him; and he leant in at this point. “Servadac
knew Verne,” he said, smiling. “Had worked as a crewman on his yacht. When he
had
his
vision, he went to Verne. That’s what happened.”

“Yeah,” said Hector
senior, nodding sombrely, as if he knew what the hell this was about.

“Verne wrote it up,
published as fiction of course. But, as a novel, it’s so far removed from his
usual thing — his usual thing, you know, is
thoroughly plausible
machines
and inventions, it’s all very much feet-on-the-ground stuff. But
Off On A Comet,
man, that’s strange.
Servadac.
Didn’t you think it was strange?”

“Sure,” said Hector.

“That marks it out. Its
very strangeness is the badge of its truth.”

“I guess I don’t understand what you mean by true.”

“It came to him, to
Servadac,
as
a vision, a vision so intense he felt he was
living
it,”
Tom said, with unnerving vehemence. “It was a warning. It came a little early,
yeah. But it was a true warning.”

Hector played with his
beer, picking at and peeling away the Budweiser label, rolling it up between
his finger into a skinny cigarette, and then unrolling it. He could not think
of a suitably forceful manner of expressing how absurd this sounded to him.
Once Tom had moved away to talk to somebody else, he leant closer to his Dad
and asked: “You really believe that?”

His father only nodded.

The light faded, the red
hills becoming cigar-coloured, and then they were black against a carbon-purple
sky fantastically replete with stars. Some people, as if to preserve the
wild-west mood, were lighting actual oil lamps and suspending them from the overhang.

Hector took himself off
to bed.

He had slept on the
plane over from France, and had been able to stay awake all day without much
bother. This was his patented failsafe technique for dealing with jet-lag: to
push through the first full day, to resist the urge to nap in the afternoon and
then to go straight to sleep at the proper time. Nevertheless his body clock
was operating according to a different logic than the daytime-nighttime of
California, and he did not feel sleepy at this point.

He undressed, naked in
the heat, and sat in bed to read for a while. There was no bedside table, or
bedside lamp, so he was forced to read by the main ceiling light. Attempting to
move his bed to be better placed underneath this light source he discovered
that all four legs were screwed into the floor. This annoyed him. And so
instead of reading his book, he sat up, with the cotton sheet over his naked
body, and fumed mentally. He wanted to masturbate, but at the same time he
half-hoped, whilst more than half-disbelieving, that the Bulgarian woman would
come to his room; in which case he wanted to keep himself in a state of
appropriate readiness.

The lightshade threw a
wineglass shaped shadow over the ceiling.

If Dad had been
possessed by the Bible, he thought to himself, would that have been better or
worse? Possessed by the book of Mormon, and visions that told him to build a
temple in the desert, something like that? But that would have been worse,
because his Dad had always been thoroughly practical and material; it was his
Mom who had been artistic and mystical. And his Mom had died, and floated away
to some mystical realm, beyond Hector’s reach, whilst his Dad had stayed right
here, thank you very much, slap in the middle of the material, physical realm,
living and breathing and smelling of sweat.
Jules Verne?
It was too
outlandish even to be weird, like something so cold it feels hot.

He ordered the thoughts
in his brain. He told himself: I’ll put these thoughts in some sort of order in
my brain, file them away, and then I can go to sleep. And, glancing at the
inside of his bedroom door, if this woman comes, she can damned well come and
wake me up.

It was the
particular
book that galled him. For his Dad to think that — say —
20,000 Leagues
Under the Sea
was a true story would be one thing, surely batty but within
the realm of possibility. Maybe some nineteenth-century billionaire could have
secretly constructed a submarine, and blah-blah-blah, and maybe it had been
hidden from the world and blah-blah-blah. But
this
book, with its kooky
Hale-Bopp-cultist air, its fly-away-on-a-comet-to-paradise nonsense? And his
Dad had had visions, telling him
this
book was true, that the world was
going to end this way?

He had not, he realized,
ordered his thoughts. He had made himself more annoyed. He got out of bed and
turned out the main light and got back into bed. He lay in the dark for a
long
time, thank you very much.

So, he went to sleep. It
was dark, and he went to sleep. Despite the fact that his body thought it was
mid-morning rather than late at night. In fact, he fell asleep just as he was
telling himself that, in a minute, he’d get out of bed and turn the light back
on so as to be awake when the world ended. But, with the perversity of the
unconscious, it was this that acted as a trigger and propelled him into sleep.

So when the world indeed
ended, he was asleep.

He was woken because
somebody was shaking him, rocking him from side to side in the bed. The sheet
was on the floor beside the bed.

Nobody was rocking him
from side to side. He was alone in the room. But he was rocking from side to
side.

He yelped, and woke up,
or, more precisely, came to an approximation of consciousness. Grains of sleep
made his eyelids sticky and unresponsive.

He jumped out of the
bed. At some level of his half-awake brain he knew this was an earthquake. He’d
grown up in California, so he knew about earthquakes, and he told himself that
the thing to .do was get out of the house as fast as possible, to get the
hell
out of
there.

He stumbled to the door
and pulled it open. It felt like a live thing in his hands, trembling and
shaking as if afraid. He flung it open, but it bounced and juddered back and
forth on its hinges. The floor heaved beneath him as if the room were about to
vomit. The straight rectangle of the doorframe warped as he staggered through
it to a parallelogram, and then flicked back to a rectangle.

The carpet wriggled
underneath his naked feet as he rushed at the landing. In the funhouse
surrealism of this jelly house, and in his half-awake, panicked state, Hector
acted instinctively. He ran as if he were in the Pasadena house; not this
strange new ranch, but the house he knew in his bones, the place where he had
grown up. He ran in the dark and turned right to bound down the staircase. But
there wasn’t a staircase. Instead he received a smack across his stomach, as if
somebody had thwacked him fairly hard with a pool cue, and suddenly he was
falling.

His mind clarified with
extraordinary suddenness. The earthquake tremor vanished from his senses. He
understood instantly what he had done; he had run right through the railing
along the top of the landing and was falling through space, such a
stupid
thing
to do, such (he immediately believed, with complete conviction) a stupid way to
die.
He thought two thoughts in rapid succession: one, an annoyance that
he had never even learnt the name of the Bulgarian woman; the other, more
self-remorseful wail,
I’m thirty-eight and I’m going to die without even
getting
tenure
for fuck’s sake.

He was weightless for
the second, or second-and-a-half, of the fall.

Then he collided with
something that jarred his ankles painfully. He felt a tumble of further motion,
up-down, difficult to make sense of in the dark, and then he was standing
upright on the trembling floor. It took considerably longer to understand that
he was still alive than it had done to realize that he was falling. His heart
was gulping repeatedly in his chest, and his nerves burned along his limbs and
up and down his torso.

In his mind came one
thought, with bell-like clarity: her name is Vera Dimitrov and they call her
Dimmi.

The earthquake was still
going on, but it seemed diminished in comparison with the intensity of Hector’s
own aftershock and fear. He turned on wobbly legs, and looked behind him. In
the extreme dimness of the hallway he could just make out the crescent shape of
the sofa that had broken his fall. He had burst through the railing at the top
of the balcony hallway, and happened to land exactly on the central cushion. He
had bounced up and forward and come to rest where he was now standing. It was a
fluke.

A light went on. Hector
flinched.

His father came in. “Are
you up?” he asked.

“It’s an earthquake
falling,” said Hector, through a gummy mouth. “We should get outside.”

With a precision of
diction that only added to the sense of unreality pervading the night, Hector
senior said, “The house is reinforced. The house is the safest place to be
right now Go back to bed, Hec. Go back upstairs to bed.”

Still trembling, Hector
obeyed his father, pulling himself up the stairs by the shuddering banister and
retracing his steps to his room. As in a fever-dream he clambered back onto his
juddery mattress, and pulled the sheet back over himself, and lay there whilst
the world shimmied and shook all around him.

He fell asleep again,
despite all the shuddering. When the earthquake subsided he woke, with the
unexpected stillness of the earth; but an aftershock ruffled through the
ground, and another one, and he started counting them, and soon was asleep
again.

He dreamt, for some
reason, of a fireworks show. He was in the Pasadena house again, with the
Bulgarian woman, Vera or Dimmi or Hot Momma or whatever she was called, and she
was smiling at him over her shoulder as she walked away. But as she stepped
through the door she was a different person, and dream-Hector believed she had
removed her face Mission-Impossible-style, to reveal somebody else underneath.
The door of the house opened, with the impossibly concertinaed topography of dreams,
directly into Griffith Park. It was dusk, and many people were milling about
underneath a sharkskin-coloured sky. Hector tried to catch up with Vera, but
placing a hand on her shoulder she turned and was a stranger, somebody he didn’t
recognize. “Your point?” this stranger asked. “Your point is?” “That’s a pretty
fucking deep question,” replied dream-Hector, trying to throw a laugh into the
statement but only managing an insincere gurgle. Somebody else (the connection
wasn’t clear, it jumbled) was talking to a crowd, and dream-Hector trying to
push to the front, and the speaker was saying “these fireworks are special,
they are the true nature of things.” Dream-Hector thought to himself, “that
sounds like my Dad”, but it wasn’t his Dad, it was some dark-skinned, dark-eyed
man no older than Hector was himself. The sky had dimmed abruptly into a clear
desert night-sky, flush with stars like dustings of static electricity, and in
between the sparkles was a purple so dark it was barely distinguishable from black.
“These fireworks,” the speaker was still saying, “are special, they are the
true nature of things. You’ve heard of the Big Bang? That was exactly like
these fireworks.” Dream-Hector tried to contradict, because this didn’t seem to
him right at all, the Big Bang being ancient history not current affairs, but
he couldn’t remember when fireworks were invented, the Chinese wasn’t it, and
his mouth was gummed up, he couldn’t form the words. He turned to the person
next to him in the crowd, but everybody’s face was angled upwards, looking at
the dark sky, and above him the fireworks were bursting in glory, marvellous
sunflower- and lily-shaped expansions of light occupying the sky hugely,
flowering with intense illumination, and then breaking into crumbs of neon red
and white.

He woke to a bright
window. After the end of the world.

The shaking house, and
himself falling from the first storey. “Well,” he said, to his empty room, “was
that a
fucking
weird dream?” But he knew that it had not been a dream.
He knew it had all happened. The palms of his feet felt tender, as if they’d
both been slapped hard. Otherwise he was unhurt. But his mind was dancing,
one-two-three, one-two-three.