The Weightless World (18 page)

We don’t look at each other or speak to each other. I gaze at the sky, one faraway section of it, crossed loosely and intermittently by a blue light and a gold light. After a while she passes me a water bottle and I drink. Then I rest my forehead on the dashboard, lulled by contact with the hot and pitted plastic. Then I sit up and drink some more and eat a piece of roti that Asha produces from somewhere, hard, dry, surely not a piece of the fleshly fresh bread I brought her earlier, then I go back to gazing at the sky. A blue light and a gold light, rhythmically swinging, like vast pretentious desk-toys, like the executive playthings of absent and outdated gods.

Asha says, ‘He asks you a question about yourself and even as he speaks you feel the opening of a chamber inside him into which he will take the answer you give him, where he will repose it and cherish it and seat it on cushions and drape it with veils. A Regency chamber, all glitter and plush, all English space and rest. He will keep the answer you give him here forever. Even when both of you are gone, dead, decayed, unstrung into your DNA, you know this chamber will remain. He leans towards you and he smiles and his voice is the voice of the smiling face in the gilt-edged mirror and he asks where you were born, what your parents were like, any brothers or sisters, how many, where you went to school, which lessons you liked, which you didn’t, why, what were your dreams when you were sixteen, who did you love, who loved you, who hurt you most and who was most hurt by you, how did you come by this line of work, why do you do it, how much do you earn, how much does it excite you, why, where do you see yourself in five years’ time, and it doesn’t matter what he asks because he makes sure you know the only
thing that matters is your answer, the answer you alone could give, the answer he will seat on cushions and drape with veils and preserve in that English space, and you know this is worth everything, he makes sure you know this too, what he gives you when he takes your answer is worth everything.’

‘I’ve no idea what you’re talking about,’ I say.

The day is almost over when a sound of commotion causes me to sit up again, to raise my forehead from the dashboard and see Harry and Ess, still standing outside the cabin, now arguing, or anyway shouting at each other. I see also that I am alone in the car. The driver-side door is open and Asha is striding on bare feet towards the shouting men. As she calls out and starts to remonstrate with them, I slowly push open my door, step outside and begin walking towards them also.

Everyone is shouting. I stop walking several paces away and put my hands over my ears. I don’t need to hear them to know what they’re shouting about. Asha is shouting that this is no way for grown men to behave. Harry is shouting that he is sorry. Ess is shouting that he wishes to die, that all he wishes is to be forgotten and to die.

After a while Ess falls silent. Harry goes on shouting and so does Asha. Ess waves a hand at them, turns away. He folds his arms and holds them in front of him as if they’re a terrible burden. His head hangs forward, as if it too is unbearably heavy. Then he looks up and there’s his face, with closed eyes and downturned lips, a straining rictus, an ancient carving of grief. It’s the face of those people you see on TV, keening next to craters where their homes used to be, next to heaps of Kolkata rubble in which their loved ones have been carelessly entombed. Except, obviously, it’s not that face at all. It’s the face of a humiliated businessman. It’s the face of a middle-aged executive who has blown the biggest
business deal in history and lost all his money to boot. Except, obviously, it’s not that face at all.

He sees me, starts to traipse towards me. I stand with my hands over my ears.

Then we hear the shot.

The report seems to get louder and louder, amplified by the vast echo chamber of the plain. Even with my hands over my ears I can hear it getting louder, louder. Ess stops traipsing towards me. His eyes widen. The fibres of his woodcarving rictus swivel and stir. He looks like a man at the point of death – that surprise, that innocence.

Tarik is standing in the doorway of his cabin. He is holding his gun, gripping it in both hands, blinking behind his specs and pointing his gun through a sheet of white smoke. The heavy air keeps trying clumsily to whisk this sheet away, but fails, only tugging at it, rippling it, causing it to shimmy. The expression on Tarik’s face is intricate, flickering with thought, though he is also weeping continuously. He has shot someone but it’s not Ess.

Harry turns so suddenly he almost unbalances himself. He teeters then stands with a hand shading his eyes, looking away across the plain.

Asha runs at Tarik. She knocks the gun from his hand and knocks him backwards through the doorway into the cabin. She too disappears into the cabin.

Ess stands, eyes wide, his face a mass of wavering filaments. He drops his hands over his head, laces his fingers together, goes on standing there, quietly, patiently, almost happily, like a child awaiting further instruction.

I look at Harry then look at what Harry’s looking at. Far away across the plain, two dots: one black, one red. The red of the red one is brilliant, familiar. Then it billows slightly and I know what it is. The red of a T-shirt, too big for its wearer’s body.

At last I take my hands from my ears. I shout: ‘Laxman!’

Tarik has shot Laxman. But Tarik is nowhere in sight.

Harry standing with a palm shading his eyes.

Ess wearing the hat of his joined hands, patiently waiting.

I start to run. I shout again: ‘Laxman!’

As I run the dots on the plain slowly become people – teenagers, young men. The one dressed in black is flitting from side to side of the one in the red T-shirt lying flat on the ground. The one in black seems to be trying to raise the lying-down one. But the lying-down one is not getting up, is not capable of getting up.

Then my back fires. No click, no needly pain, but an explosion of impact, crumpling everything. As if part of the impact of that car four years ago in Yeovil didn’t quite reach me at the time and catches up with me only now. The explosion, the crumple, the spiral of fiery agony carries me off my feet and throws me down in the dust.

I try to get up, but I can’t. The agony bids me hold still. I stare at a pebble, small and white and covered with fine cracks on one side, very close to my face. After what seems an incredibly long time I move my head and I see Harry shading his eyes, Ess standing under his hands. Then I move my head again, look in the direction of the two human dots, the two young men, Laxman and his black-clothed friend, but the plain is empty; they’ve gone.

By the time I can stand and move and walk back towards the cabin, Harry is crouching over Ess, who is now lying on his side on the ground. He appears to be asleep, though his eyes are open. Harry keeps muttering to him, stroking his arm, but Ess gives no indication that he’s aware of any of this. Then Harry says to me, ‘We should move him.’

I look at Harry. I tolerate the idea of smashing his head open, of finding a rock and stoving in his skull. But I can hardly stand, hardly move. Crouching, with trembling calves, Harry manages to turn Ess on his back, then work his hands in under his arms and pull him up onto his feet. Ess wavers, sinks against him, threatens to unbalance them both. I put my hands on Harry’s back and push, as firmly as I can, to support them. Briefly the two men totter from side to side then they stabilise and Harry begins to lead Ess towards the storage shed in which we’ve been sleeping and I hobble after them.

Harry drops Ess onto his sleeping bag. He doesn’t mean to, he tries to lower him, to let him down gently, but at some point his grip fails and Ess slips away from him and falls in a sitting position onto his sleeping bag then slumps over on his side. His head rolls and knocks hard against the shed’s planks. Harry says, ‘Fuck.’

I stand leaning against the wall. Harry looks at each of us then coughs and says he should check on Tarik. I don’t say anything. Then Harry goes out and leaves Ess and me alone in the shed.

After a while I can sit again, and I sit. I take hold of Ess’s head and turn it towards me as carefully as I can. His eyes are still open, but he doesn’t appear to be in pain. There is a livid patch on his forehead where he knocked against the planks. Otherwise his face is blank, slack, unoccupied.

For a long time nothing happens. Then I hear noises from the cabin – the muffled rumble of raised voices. The voices grow louder, sharper. One gives way to shouts. The other voices subside. The shouting voice gives way to cries then subsides also. Then there are other noises from the cabin, not the noises of voices.

I wait until nine then open my tablet and log into my Skype account. The wifi icon flickers, the circles ping. I stare at them for as long as I can bear to, which is about the same length of time it takes me to realise that I’m crying, shaking with grief.

I log out of the Skype account and log in to my email. All this takes a while, with the way my crying makes my hands quake and my fingers skid about on the screen, painting it with zigzags of tears and snot. Then my email opens and straight away I see there’s a new message from Alice. The subject line is: ‘Daniel’. I tap on it to open the message and, with a dubious fillip, the message opens:

I watch my fingers as they close my email and re-open my Skype account. The circles ping and I watch them. All they have to do is reach across the earth and find Alice and bring her to me. They ping and ping and I watch them.

Daniel has died. I understand this but at the same time it means almost nothing to me. What does it mean? It means that he’s gone, as Alice said, that he’s vanished down the pathway – the pathway out of life, from the realm of the living to the region of the dead, to the shadow sphere, the weightless world. But I don’t know what that means either.

I stare at the screen. The circles ping, ping. Then the wifi icon shrivels, the circles dim then blip to nothing and the screen holds nothing but futile light.

Somewhere on the face of the earth Alice is staring into her laptop. She’s waiting for it to conjure me, to incarnate me. But
the magic has failed. She is there and I am here and the curve of the planet turns stubbornly, irreducibly between us.

I stare at the screen. And then, at the same instant that I realise I’m howling – that my mouth is wide open and I’m howling – I raise my tablet in both hands and smash it down on my knee. The thing crunches and I feel a jolt of pain. I smash the tablet down again, again, the pain convulsing my leg, my whole body, until the tablet breaks. A lot of mysterious flexible internal stuff keeps the pieces linked together, but I twist and wrench at them until they separate, tear apart like a hunk of dense bread. The piece still in my hand I fling against the wall. It taps lightly on the planks then drops rustling among the other crap back there. Another piece, to which the screen is still attached, a warped misty sheet, like a gigantic fingernail, I kick away with my heel.

Then there’s nothing else to do. I look at Ess. He blinks. I watch him closely, almost holding my breath, waiting for some other indication that he’s still alive, still in there. But he only blinks, breathes.

‘Ess?’ I say. The croak of grief in my voice is faintly surprising. I say, ‘You should have killed me. I’ve been thinking about it and I think it would have been better. I think it would have been better if you’d just killed me.’

In Toulouse in 2011 Ess said, ‘It’s hard to believe, isn’t it?’

We were sitting in the balcony of his executive suite in the dusky evening. We’d spent the day on a walking tour with the charming Skycoach representative, and the hours in the sun had left us dazed and reflective. Now, with an imperial gesture, he waved a hand at the view from the balcony – picturesque central Toulouse, and by extension all France, all civilized Europe. At that time such gestures still seemed entirely appropriate to him.

‘Hard to believe that it’s real,’ he said. ‘You see it, but some part of you rejects it. Don’t you find? You’d think I’d be used to it by now, but let me tell you, Mr Strauss: I’m not. I feel the same way every time I come on one of these jaunts. Doesn’t matter how often I take the flight, hail the cab, check in at reception, unpack my suitcase, then move at last to the window, the balcony… Every time that frisson of rejection. The unreality of France, the unreality of Spain. The unreality of South Africa. The unreality of the United States of America. I sit in my balcony and I’m expected to
believe
… A wee lad from Yeovil, from the mizzle and the mud, from the green and the brown. That’s what I am, you see, even to this day, a wee Yeovil lad with grass stains on his knees and a completely black scab on his elbow and tiny crisscross sort of wounds on his cheek where he once got stamped by a cow into a cattle-grid, horrible experience, probably the defining moment of my life, the coalescing trauma or what-you-will, you can still see them, faint red lines, just here…?’

I looked: the graph-paper scar. ‘Barely.’

‘Really? Well, the marks may fade from the surface, but inside I bear the scars yet. Have no doubt about that. Mud and mizzle and a cow’s hoof stamping my head into a cattle-grid. The filth down there, shiny pebbles, stones, grit, but also bloody wool and torn-off nail and bits of bone gone black and grey. That’s reality, the look of it, the taste of it, the feel of it that you carry round with you everywhere, a little heap in the base of your stomach, and then you sit in a balcony like this and you see a view like that… and something doesn’t quite make sense, does it? It doesn’t
add up
.’

‘We’re lucky,’ I said. I laughed. ‘Lucky devils.’

He looked at me. At that time his look was still like the look of a vastly powerful alien being – an extraterrestrial emperor or god. Then he smiled, gradually, gracefully, a smile to be etched in marble and displayed as the central monument of an idealistic
community of the far future, and he said, ‘It’s not luck. Do you really think luck did this?’ He chuckled fantastically. His humiliation by Skycoach was still eleven hours away. ‘No, I’ll tell you what did this. Heroic madness. A kind of, if you will, divine lunacy. That celestial derangement that allows a man to preserve his own reality – to hold fast to that kernel, so to speak, that rough cluster, the bloody wool and nail of his own reality – when the world surrounding him is wholly and irremediably unreal.’

‘So, what you’re saying is, we’re mental.’

‘I’m afraid so. The pair of us. Irremediably cracked.’ He laughed and I did too.

Toulouse was settling into the grain of its woodcut dusk. Ess took a sip of brandy then sat whirling the glass in his hand.

‘One other thing.’ He frowned into his glass, then up at me. His eyes were sharp with drink – not misty, not clouded, but oddly piercing, far-seeing. ‘While we’re talking. Sometimes, just occasionally… you know you are here, don’t you?’

‘How do you mean?’ I asked, grinning.

‘You know you are here. You know you are now. You take a breath and you draw down the air of this momentary heaven. You sit and you apply pressure to surfaces. You lean back and the bones of the chair creak.’

‘Sorry, Ess,’ I was grinning, ‘no idea what you’re talking about.’

‘You know you are real, don’t you? That you are a person…’

‘Yeah, obviously I do. Obviously.’

‘Yes. Of course you do.’

I wake to sunlight and murmuring. I sit up on my sleeping bag. Ess, lying next to me on his, has finally closed his eyes. He’s breathing, softly snoring, in a way you could almost believe is peaceful.

On the ground in front of me are some of the ragged bits of my tablet: shiny crinkly black squares, irregular-edged, like the parts of a dully impossible jigsaw puzzle.

My back feels numb, solid, without give or flex. It doesn’t hurt to move it; only I can barely move it. Awkwardly I stand.

I put a hand on the wall. I pick up my water bottle, drink, then go back to standing with a hand on the wall. I listen to the murmuring, the muttering from the cabin.

I shuffle to the open door and stand in the doorway, in the flood of morning sunlight. I scan the plain, left to right, my eyes in the morning heat seeming to wiggle on their sticks. Harry’s camp has now completely gone, leaving not even a mark on the dusty ground. The netted obelisk of his backpack has gone too; I assume he came out in the night at some point and took it into the cabin. The Adventurers car is still where I expect it to be. In fact everything looks more or less as I expect it to look, barring only my surprise that our being here has made so slight an impression. Frightening, how slight the impression we make. In a city, a town, maybe this truth would be less obvious (though no less true). But the plain conceals nothing. The great inhuman dream of it will shake us from its bones and its teeth, grind to atoms our every trace. Soon there will be nothing to prove we were ever here at all.

Something’s wrong – something other than the plain’s vast denial of our presence or consequence. I listen to the murmuring, muttering, buzzing from the cabin. Then I realise what’s wrong. The sounds I can hear, the sounds I’ve been hearing since I woke up, are not coming from the cabin. They’re coming from somewhere else.

At first I think they’re coming from the plain, from the plain itself, from its heat and mass, its gnarled static and bleached wavelength. Then I look and I see where they’re really coming from, the row of figures blurring into visibility on the horizon,
slowly materialising from the ripply distance and heat haze. A row of tiny dark human shapes: five, six men, no seven, no eight.

Even at this distance I can see that their hands are not empty. Their silhouetted arms seem to have grown slender tapering branches, but I know what this means is they are carrying the same strange farming gear I saw them wielding on our first visit to their village – rods, staffs, sickles, scythes.

Eight men from Laxman’s village are marching on Tarik’s cabin. Marching towards us through the light and heat and distance and dust.

I rebound into the storage shed as if struck – as if again struck by a large vehicle in rapid motion. I bend over Ess, shake his shoulder, call his name, do everything I can think of to rouse him. But he will not be roused. ‘Ess,’ I wail, ‘Ess, Ess.’ His snoring stops, his breathing shifts its pitch. His eyes spongily open then spongily close. I shout at him, yank his arm, slap his face. But he will not be roused.

‘Ess,’ I wail, ‘I’m not messing about. People are coming, people who are very, very pissed off with us. We’ve got to go. Do you hear what I’m saying? We’ve got to wake up and go.’

I wait for his eyes to open again but they don’t. Then I straighten up and scuttle over to the cabin and start banging on the door.

‘Wake up!’ I shout into the cabin. ‘You bastards! You
bastards
! Wake up and get out here! Get
the fuck
out here, you bastards!’

The door opens and Harry leans out with a windswept look. He squints at me, then his head judders back and he squints past me, over my shoulder. I have a pretty good idea what he’s squinting at, though I turn to look too anyway.

The marching men of the village have almost reached us. They are so close now it’s possible to see that they are not in fact even really marching – they’re walking, not quite strolling, not quite ambling, moving with steady but somehow shuffle-footed
purpose. They have sticks in their hands, bladed tools, spindling instruments.