The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures (46 page)

Hector climbed out of the car, and pushed a smile to the front of his face. “Hi Dad, hi” he called, energetically. “Hey, you look
great.”
But he didn’t look great; his hair had thinned across the crown, and large amoeba-shaped freckles, horribly expressive of advancing age, had come into being across his broad brow and scalp. Old, old. But as he came up the steps of the porch one at a time, Hector was also aware of how he must look to his father; podgy, nervy, pale.

They hugged, Dad’s face swimming up close like an asteroid ready to crash into the world of Hector’s head, but swerving to one side at the last minute. The old man clapped his son’s back, and Hector returned the gesture, but there was little heat in it. Hector had seen something, something almost imperceptible, in his Dad’s eyes the fraction before they had actually embraced. It occurred to him, as if for the first time, that his father was actually scared by his son.

Not physically scared, of course; this tall, lean, still-muscular man could face no plausible physical threat from his shorter, jellied, breathless offspring. Not that, but something more abstract and therefore even more startling. Because Hector’s father was not one to spend too much mental energy on abstracts; and yet it was as if, looking at his son for the first time in a year and a half, the older man had experienced a sort of unnerving, a tremor in the soul. It was a revelation for Hector, who had always completely taken it for granted that his father was much stronger than he in character as well as in body; that this seemingly self-sufficient man might look nervously upon the arrival of his son to his house; that he might not know what to say; that he might be anxious about making a fool of himself, of simply having to interact with this other human being — this had literally never occurred to Hector before. And he had the miniaturely vertiginous sense of himself as his father must see him: not merely out-of-shape and fidgety, but as his own flesh and blood rendered implacably and impenetrably other by the process of growing up, of a monstrous hybrid between his father’s self and the safely alien other people in his father’s life.

The old man stood back, and looked at his son. “Yeah, guys,” he said, apparently talking directly at Hector but in fact addressing the two people standing behind him on the porch, “this is Hector junior. Hec, that’s,” he added with a hitchhiker’s gesture of his right thumb over his shoulder, “Tom Brideson and Vera Dimitrov, we call her Dimmi. She’s,” he went on, after an awkward little pause, “Bulgarian.” And then, after another pause, as if the thought were belatedly occurring to him that he should warn his son away from her, he added, “yeah, she’s with Tom, they’re a couple.”

“I’m delighted to meet you,” said Hector, relishing his chance to try on a little bit of his newly acquired, flouncy old-European manner.

“Good to meet you,” said Tom.

“Yes, nice to meet you,” said Vera, in accentless English.

Father and son stood looking at one another. The awkwardness was palpable, almost painful. “I got your book,” Hector senior said, shortly. The book had been, in fact, one issue of an academic journal,
Art and Aesthetics,
in which Hector had published an article about late Cézanne.

“Great,” said Hector, adding, superfluously, “I hope you didn’t read it. You didn’t need to read it.”

“Yeah,” said his father, meaning no. And then: “Marjorie not with you?”

Hector took this, almost eagerly, as an excuse to talk about himself. “To tell you the truth,” he said, rocking back on his heels, “Marj and I are going through a more distant period right now. We’re still amicable, we’re still on dinner and-wine terms, but she’s in London now. I think she’s seeing a guy there. We parted on perfectly amicable terms. I mean, it was never as if we were going to get
married.”
But looking again at his father’s face he could see that these details were of no interest to him at all. A realization dawned.

“Oh,” he said, his shoulders slumping a little. “Did you ask that in our self-appointed capacity as the new frigging Noah?” He started into this sentence thinking it a witty observation, a chirpy son-to-father thing to say; but as soon as the words were spoken he realized how much
venom
he was expressing, how angry this ridiculous new phase in his Dad’s dotage was making him. His own rage unnerved him. “Two by two into the ark, Hec and his mate, is that it?”

Hector senior didn’t flinch. “Yeah,” he said.

4

He heard the whole story, but not in one continuous narrative: instead it came out in a couple of separate interchanges with his father, and with some of his father’s disciples. Hector junior took his small suitcase upstairs to a bare room with a single bed, and unpacked whilst his father stood in the doorway. The room had white walls and a plain crucifix over its single window. There was a deal dresser with glass handles screwed into the wall. There was no TV. “Yeah,” said Hector senior, “there’s a radio in the bottom drawer. It’s a windup radio.”

“Thanks,” said Hector.

“You hungry? We had lunch already. But — if you’re hungry?”

“So,” said Hector, “those two, the Bulgarian girl and the other guy, they are living here?”

“They live out back.”

“Out back?”

“The second building. There’s a group.”

Hector put a folded shirt in the top drawer. “I see,” he said. “Like a commune?”

“Yeah,” said his father, but he was shaking his head. “You might jump to that conclusion. But they’re allsorts. A dozen or so. Mix of genders.”

“This end of the frigging world,” said Hector, not looking at his father. He couldn’t bring himself to say
_fucking
in his father’s presence. “It’s an extreme thing to believe, isn’t it?

It’s old, Dad. It’s bent out of shape, don’t you think? Are they all religious, the ones staying?”

At first it seemed as if his Dad wasn’t going to answer. “I couldn’t lay the cables without them. Besides, we’ll need them later.” And then: “You want to have a look round the new place?”

“Sure,” said Hector.

They walked together around the half dozen buildings; the ranch house, and a newer barn-like building with a dozen rooms inside it. Another barn was filled with an astonishing mass of supplies, tinned food, seeds, huge drums of something or other, electrical equipment, mysterious crates. “You got a storehouse here,” Hector said, “that any survivalist would be proud to own.”

“Yeah,” said his Father.

The sun was so hot it felt like a heated cloth wrapped around Hector. It made his eyes water.

A group of half a dozen men and women were working out the back, spooling a fat serpent of cable from a large mechanized wheel on the back of a truck. The cable was going in the ground. Away in the direction of the lay, on the side of the hill, a second group were digging a hole. Hector senior introduced the cable-laying workers to his son, and Hector junior forgot all their names straight away.

As they walked back to the ranch house, Hector asked, “The cable?”

“A special carbon bond,” was the reply. “It’s a strengthening thing, yeah. It binds the land, strengthens it. The clever thing is that it has some
give
in it, it’s not too rigid, see, so it helps absorbs the tremors. It’ll keep the ranch in one piece.”

“OK,” said Hector, wincing inwardly to see his father so evidently throwing his money away on this crank end-of the-world notion, “I see. For earthquakes, is it?”

“Any kinda tremor,” said his father.

Inside they fetched two mid-day beers, and sat down on the porch outside to drink them together. They talked about the book. “I read the book,” Hector told his Dad. “After I got your email. The end of the world is nigh!”

“Yeah,” said his Dad.

“Took me a while to track it down,” said Hector. The sentence didn’t come out as rebuking as he’d thought, or hoped, it might. “That title
Off On A Comet,
that’s not the title in French. I,” he added, preening a little, “I read it in French, you know.”

“Yeah,” said his Dad. The bright sunlight brought out the lines in his face, like acid resolving the grooves and gouges into an etcher’s plate. They fanned from the corners of his eyes, like the route-maps provided by airlines from a hub, Atlanta say, to a hundred destinations. His left cheek had a deep fold running from his eye to the corner of his mouth, but there was no corresponding fold on his right cheek. Perhaps he slept always on his left side, always pressing the crease into that side of his face, every night.

“It’s a crazy book,” he told his father.

“Yeah,” said his Dad. “It’s some book.”

But this was not what Hector had meant. “So,” he said, breezily, “the hero, this guy you reckon is an ancestor he’s in the French army in Algeria. And this comet hits the earth, and he’s there with his batman and at first he thinks it’s resulted in this great flood, since he’s surrounded by sea which he wasn’t before.” Hector’s father stared impassively at his son during this recital of a story that he knew perfectly well. But Hector junior wanted to stress the absurdity of the adventure, and hence of his father’s new craze. “He searches about and finds some more survivors of this comet-hit, and they all band together, but something’s gone screwy with the heavens, the sun’s rising in the west —”

Hector paused, loitering over this point for reasons he didn’t wholly fathom within himself.

“Rising in the west, and Venus looming large, and so on. Then it turns out they’re all living on a chunk of land —
and
sea, which is I think we can agree
pretty
tough to swallow — that’s been knocked off the earth by the collision of the comet and carried
away on
the comet . . .” Hector shook his head. “You see how crazy that is?”

“Yeah,” said his Dad. “Tell me — how is it crazy?”

“Well for one thing, this comet crashes into North Africa, scoops up a chunk of the ground, and flies on . . . but the people on the chunk of land can still see the sky, they’re not you-know
embedded
in the comet, so the chunk of ground must somehow have been flipped over through one-hundred-eighty ...” He grinned a goofy grin to emphasize how stupid this was. “Then they fly through the solar system, with — you know, gravity, and with atmosphere, and with the sea freezing rather than boiling off into space, it’s daffy.”

“Yeah,” said Hector senior.

“And then they return to the earth at the end and they plan to float off the comet in a balloon, and then they just float into the Earth’s atmosphere,
phhhw.”
Hector raised his hands, palms upwards, in front of his chest, as if lifting two fragile, invisible spheres. “Crazy. And then they get home, and nobody’s noticed that they’ve even gone, and nobody seems to have figured that a comet carried off half of Algeria. I mean, what is that? Is it one of those, And I Awoke and Behold it was a Dream things?”

His father was staring into the middle distance. How he could look so long, without sunglasses, without even wrinkling his broad blue eyes, was beyond Hector.

“Then I figured the name of the guy, the title of the book in French, is Servadac, and that’s
‘cadavers’
reversed. You see? So I figured it was a trope,” and as he spoke, he revised his words
en courant
to an idiom more appropriate for his father, substituting, “a manner of speaking, a metaphor rather than a literal account. It was Verne deconstructing, you know, Verne criticizing and playing around with the conventions of nineteenth-century science fiction. I wondered whether it isn’t all about death, and spirit journeys, what are they called, astral journeys, and heaven and hell and so on. I’m not hugely experienced in reading these sorts of texts. Books I mean.” Hector had minored in English, but it had mostly been Shakespeare and African-American literature. He had majored in History of Art.

“It’s kind of a shame,” said his father, in a low voice with a burr underneath it, as if he needed to clear his throat with a strong cough, “that you didn’t bring Marjorie with you.”

5

Outside, alone, Hector walked over to a low concrete structure, three feet in all directions, perhaps some sort of bunker or store, and sat on the edge of this and smoked a cigarette. The fact that the ranch was in a declivity gave it a weirdly foreshortened, film-set feel; the horizon looked close enough to touch. The sky above was pure, cyanide blue. The sunlight felt heavy and hot. He wondered, absently, whether he shouldn’t borrow a hat from his Dad.

No cicadas spoiled the perfect silence.

At Yale, where he’d majored in Art History, Hector’s room-mate had been a theology student, a lawyer’s son from Pennsylvania called Orwell Matthiesson. Hector remembered his own astonishment, imperfectly hidden behind a bottle of beer in a dim-lit bar, when Orwell had described — laughing, as if it were the biggest joke in the world —
punching
his own father during a fight. “You actually hit him?” Hector had asked, goggling. Orwell was a bean-polish, sharp featured guy with long arms and big hands. “Sure,” he had replied. “I whaled him in the stomach. He saw the blow coming, he was able to tense up, no harm done. He was
mad,
though. Man he was mad with me. But you know how it is when you’re having a fight with your Dad, you know how fierce it can get.”

But Hector didn’t know. He had never once fought with his Dad, never so much as raised his voice, or stormed out of a room. He had barely even contradicted his father, during all the long years growing up in the LA house. In fact, as he looked back on his childhood and adolescence from the vantage point of Yale freshmanship, he could barely remember talking to his father at all. What did they have to talk about?

He had decided to study Art History because, he told himself, he loved art; but his first year at school had been a process of fastidiously unlearning his visual tastes; or if not unlearning (for the sorts of paintings that moved him as a teenager still stirred something in him as a student, against his better judgment) then rather a carefully modulated process of systematic repression of his gut-responses. His mother had been an artist, producing brightly coloured figurative canvasses depicting lush natural landscapes, or animals, or nudes with animals, or sometimes, Hector shuddered to recall (for these were the paintings that sold in California in the seventies) unicorns, dolphins, pumas, starscenes, zodiacal interpretations. As a child Hector had almost worshipped his mother’s ability to conjure these images out of two boxes of paint and a stretch of canvas. As a teenager, he had of course acquired distance from them, which out of her presence sometimes took the form of disdain; but his taste in the fine arts was indelibly marked by his childish immersion in those images: he loved Gauguin, he admired (without true heart’s yearning) Van Gogh, he thought Chagall beautiful. At Yale, however, after some over-enthusiastic partisanship, it dawned on him that these sorts of artists marked him as insufficiently aesthetically sophisticated, and so he conditioned himself to love abstract art, to prefer Leonardo’s sketches to his completed paintings, to drop names like Ben Nicholson and Karen Waldie. He had settled on Cézanne as a doctoral topic in part as a compromise between the figurative and the abstract. Compromise was one of the badges of his life, like stretch-marks on his soul. Coming to terms with the world, the world meeting him less than half way. It was the realization that growing up was, beyond a certain point, a kind of shrinkage.