The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures (47 page)

He had never really known what his father did for a living. Something in business, it seemed. Something involving selling, or speculating, with the now-wealthy ex-hippies of San Marino and Silverlake and Los Feliz.

Hector sat on the concrete cube in front of the ranch house and pondered as the smoke scraped into his lungs with its delicious thousands of miniature hooks, and his skull relaxed minutely. When he said to his Dad, about the Verne novel, “You see how crazy that is?” he had actually been saying “you see how crazy your life is now, Dad? You see how insane you were to sell the house and buy this ranch and move here with these weird followers, these cultists, whatever they are?” But if his Dad had deciphered this particular communication, he didn’t show it. There ought to be a way, Hector thought to himself, that I can tell Dad what I really feel.

The Bulgarian woman (Hector had forgotten her name) had come out of the house and was walking over the dirt towards him. As she approached the sound of an industrial drill started up, from somewhere well away, behind the main building. The distance shrank it to an amplified mosquito noise.

“Hello,” she said. “Do you mind if I sit with you?”

By way of response Hector offered her a cigarette. “Smoke?”

She didn’t reply, instead settling herself on the edge of the concrete, disconcertingly close to Hector. Their hips were touching. Her legs, as long as Hector’s, stretched straight out. Even in heavy-duty jeans, he could see that they were good legs, shapely legs. Trying to be surreptitious, he glanced up and down her body. His intimate from-above perspective of her breasts gave her a shelf-like forcefulness of figure. Her curling hair was dark brown. It smelt faintly of candy. Her face, which had struck Hector earlier as conventionally pretty in a broad-set sort of way, looked better in profile: the clean lines of her nose running down to a proportioned tip of flesh at the end, lines at the edges of her mouth suggesting a laughing personality. Despite his Dad’s warning, Hector’s libido, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say his mere habit of bodily response, perked up at the prospect represented by this woman. He imagined her undressing. He imagined placing his hand, purposefully, on the spot where his hip had accidentally achieved contact with hers. He speculated about the way her flesh would feel under his fingers; not too taut, not too slack. And straight away, without thinking about it, without weighing the propriety or even likelihood of success, he began wondering about the best way to get her into bed — a direct address, a sly insinuation, a slow seduction. His cigarette had burnt into a drooping hook of ash. He dropped it in the dirt.

“I’m sorry?” he asked. She had said something to him, but he’d been too preoccupied with the entwining physicality of her presence, and he hadn’t properly heard.

“Je pense que vow cherchez,”
she said, looking straight ahead,
“une simple question qui n’exigera qu’un oui ou un non. Mais c’est n’pas ça facile.”

The fact of her speaking in French further confused Hector’s fidgety, jetlagged mind. “I’m sorry?” he said again.

“You have,” she said, turning her head enough to see him out of the corner of her eye, and presenting another attractive half-profile, lips that Hector felt an actual physical itch to reach over and kiss, “just come back from France, I think?”

“Yes,” he replied. And belatedly, he added, in his flat American-accented French,
“c’est vrai. C’est simplement que votre mots prononcés . . .”

“It’s alright,” she said, smiling warmly and thickening the laughter lines prettily at the edges of her mouth. “Only I wanted to say that this question does not exist. It is more complicated than a simple yes or no, is all I wanted to say. If you could stay here longer, you’d maybe understand.”

This puzzled Hector; and piqued him too, as if he were being banished from the sexual possibilities of this woman as soon as he had been introduced to them. “I can stay,” he insisted. “Why can’t I stay? Does Dad want me to go?”

She was still looking at him out of the side of her eyes. “You misunderstand. I have not expressed myself well. You will stay as long as any of us. Only, if you could have come earlier, it would have perhaps been better.”

Hector had an insight into what she meant. “Is it happening soon, then? This end of the world stuff?”

“Tonight,” she said.

The sound of the drill rose and fell in the hot air.

“Well,” said Hector, trying to think of something witty and ingratiating to say to this woman, whose hip was still pressed so suggestively against his, “I guess I’ll get an answer to my question soon enough. Tonight, I guess.” He fiddled a new cigarette out of the packet, and slipped it into his mouth. “What happens when, or if, I should say — if tomorrow dawns and everything’s still the same as it was? I mean, like the millennium. I often wondered how the people who really believed the world was going to end in 2000, how they felt waking up the next day and realizing they were wrong.”

Instead of answering this, the woman said, “I said
if you could stay here longer
because we hoped you could have come weeks ago, and then we could have persuaded you of the inevitability of this thing. But your father thought you would get into a temper and leave, and then you would be away from the ranch when it happens.” Her accentless English slowed over these last three words, to give the unspoken “it” an appropriate weight. “So it is better that you are here only today, although it will be a shock for you when it happens.”

“If
it happens,” said Hector. He clicked his skull-topped metal lighter and placed a knob of fire on the tip of his cigarette. “I’m sorry,” he said, drawing and blowing off a lungful of smoke before removing the cigarette from his mouth and holding it away from her, “I should have asked — do you mind?”

She was looking away from him now, which gave Hector licence to peer closely at the interwoven fibres of her curly brown hair, at the snuffbox indentation in the exact centre of the back of her neck. She smelled sweet, the heat and light squeezing wafts of whatever conditioner she used out of her hair straight to Hector’s nose.

The drill stopped its noise, and sudden silence was almost as startling as sudden loudness. Hector looked hastily to the front, not wanting to be caught staring.

“I love Hector,” the woman said. And for a moment Hector’s heart scurried in his chest, and he could sense the blood pumping in his head; but she meant his father, of course. The down stroke of this realization, with its release of petty annoyance, almost tipped Hector into vindictiveness; he almost asked,
and are you sleeping with him then?
But he did not ask this question. Instead he dragged on his cigarette, and looked away to cover his confusion.

“If you’d been able to stay for a few weeks,” she said, “you might have had one of the visions yourself.”

“Oh,” he said, scornfully. “Visions, is it?”

“They are very eloquent visions.”

“Yeah?”

“Without your father,” she said, simply, “I would be, now, in Europe, and tomorrow I would be dead. You also.”

“Everybody dies,” he said; but although he intended this as debonair and fearless, it came over merely as flip and rather callous. He sucked too strongly on his cigarette again, and had to stifle a cough. “I used to imagine,” he said, spontaneously, with a tingling in his chest of the sort he felt when he was doing something reckless, something filled with the possibilities of huge triumph and huge disaster mixed together, like asking a beautiful woman out, or attempting a risqué answer to a crucial question in an important interview, “I used to imagine exactly what it would be like to fight with my Dad. I used to lie awake at night, when I was at college, planning exactly what I’d say, exactly what his response would be, how I would cut him down to size, everything. But it never came to the right moment in actual life. There are so many things,” he went on hesitantly, although in fact exaggerating his hesitancy of expression because he felt this was something he ought to express in a circumspect fashion, “so many things that I’ve never been able to communicate to him, about how I feel.”

“Your father thinks,” she said, as if replying to this confession, “that it is merely a random matter that he got the visions. That it could have happened to anybody. But I don’t think so. I think he got the visions because of who he is.”

She hopped off the ledge and turned to look at him. Her breasts moved just out of synch with the rest of her body, a fact of physics that sent jangles of electric excitement along Hector’s nerves.

“Hey,” he said, uncertain what to say.

“I think you like me,” she said, and smiled.

Hector simply stared at her.

“Perhaps you are worried about Tom, but after tonight it won’t matter so much. The first child I have
will
be his, and maybe the second. But genetic mixing is an important part of this, of this whole thing, and there are only a few men here, and it would be foolish to be too exclusive.”

This, Hector thought, wide-eyed, was perhaps the most extraordinary speech a woman had ever spoken to him. “Christ, you’re forward,” he said, gruffly, suddenly aware of his own Adam’s apple, like an unswallowed lump in his throat. “Christ.”

“You do not remember my name,” she said, smiling again. And then she turned and went back inside.

6

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.