Men in Space (35 page)

“Shit!” Nick feels a jolt of terror: the hook’s going to pass round the wheel and fall back down. A metal hook, from four floors up, and the square full of people: sailors, passers-by, two children toddling from the bakery right beneath it holding macaroons, and there’s not even time to …

But it doesn’t fall. Instead, the hook jams between the wheel and the cross which encloses it. Maybe that’s why they put the cross there in the first place: a safety feature – or at least why they made the distance between the wheel’s rim and the cross too small for the hook to pass through. Frankie’s head’s come out of the window now; he looks down, then up, then swears. Sasha appears beside Nick:

“That was stupid. Now we’ve got to go up to the roof and send the hook down again.”

“I’ll do it,” Nick says. “It was my fault.”

“I don’t argue with you,” Sasha answers, tetchy. “What you must do is go up there, then lie down …”

“I saw you do that.”

“Right. Then pull the long side up over the wheel so the short side, the side with the hook, goes down again. You must use both hands, one on each side of the wheel. Continue until the hook goes down as far as Frankie. Then its weight will be enough to carry it down to here, as before.”

“Fine.” Nick’s up the staircase, through his attic, out onto the roof. First time he’s been here; it’s a bit like when he looked out above the Leidsegracht from
Art in Europe
’s toilet
window. This altitude gives him a sense of the whole city’s layout: the mere fact that it’s below him, not around him, gives him a flighty kick. The clock on the old people’s home’s higher than him, but the square, its stalls, queues, terraces and benches, the canals leading off from it in three directions – all these are way below, prostrated. By the Waag’s drawbridge-like door another man’s holding a dictaphone or radio up to his ear. Nick runs his eye past him, along the Geldersekade. Far out, beyond Centraal Station, he can see the ships’ masts crammed together. The revolving boat’s rocking below him, still in the first, gentle phase of its cycle. Nick drops to his hands and knees, crawls towards the edge, peers over. There’s the wheel. The hook’s wedged right into its apex, where the cross’s vertical line runs over its circumference. Lie down, Sasha said. Nick does this, his head poking out over the roof’s edge towards the wheel. He reaches out, takes the hook in his left hand and tries to unwedge it. This isn’t easy: the angle from which he’s coming at it makes it awkward. The wheel’s at more or less exactly the same height as him and he’s horizontal, his arm stretched out in front of him like Superman, and so he has to move his arm across and down at the same time. When the hook does come free he has to carry on pulling it down, lifting the other end upwards with his right hand simultaneously so that the combined movements feed the rope back over the wheel. It won’t go of its own accord: as soon as he stops pulling and lifting and just holds both sides the rope tugs at his hands, the thirty or so yards to the wheel’s right side longing to fall back down to the pavement, the hook to the left straining to shoot right back into the slot. Of course: that’s what Sasha meant: the hook won’t descend until the down portion of rope outweighs the up portion. Basic principles. Nick breathes in deeply and feeds the rope over – right up, left down – six inches at a time, hand by hand by … It seems that he’s been doing this for ages, and the hook’s only dropped three yards …

It can’t be more than five yards from him when his right arm locks up. It doesn’t lock up suddenly – just refuses to lift the rope any further. Without any recourse to the force of his main body, the arm’s been hauling the rope right up from the pavement, not just from in front of him, and it’s tired itself out, died. Nick lets it drop and hang against the building’s façade. His left hand’s still clenched round the other side, the hook side. Maybe if he … No chance: the one arm, alone, can’t possibly pull the rope round the wheel, can’t even make it move a millimetre. He’ll just have to let go and – no, he can’t do that: the hook would shoot back up again, slam right into his face. What to do? His whole body feels exhausted now, not just his arm. In the square below, on the terrace, Sasha and Han are sitting, chatting. Neither of them are looking up. Nick tries to call out to them, but the sound has barely left his chest before it’s absorbed by the breeze and carried off, dissolved. He’s getting frightened now. How is he ever going to … Perhaps if he lets go and then quickly wriggles back … There won’t be time: the hook would be up at him in less than a second. He calls out again. This time the sound’s even weaker, so weak he can hardly hear it himself …

Nick thinks: don’t panic. Someone’s bound to look up eventually and realize what’s happened; then they’ll be up with him in less than a minute, take this rope from his hand, pull him back. He’ll just have to try to concentrate on something till they do, like when he modelled back at AVU. The wheel, right by his head. From this strange angle it seems not round but slightly elongated, like the halo in that painting which must be down in the transit van right now. The wheel could be a halo to him, or a crown, proclaiming him king of this elevated, horizontal plane that he alone is occupying. The cross around it, viewed from this close, doesn’t seem like a cross any more – more like a set of geometric exercises, like the ones Maňásek was doing when he started copying the thing. Its two intersecting lines
demarcate radii and segments. Behind them, the wheel’s spokes cut the sky behind them into smaller, secondary segments. That slice of lemon. Nick looks down. The table at which Sasha and Han are sitting is on a tangent that’s set off the diameter’s plumb line by an angle of perhaps thirty degrees. It, too, seems slightly elongated. Two coffee cups, Nick’s and Sasha’s, rest on saucers. Han’s genever glass is off-centre on its coaster. There’s his own empty Spa Rood glass beside it, minuscule from here, the lemon slice too small to see but certainly still in there. To be there now, at the table, in whatever conversation those two are engrossed in: if he could reinvent the world, copy it just like Maňásek copied the saint and the mountain and the buildings and the sea, he’d make everything almost exactly the same as it is now – only he’d tweak it just minutely, imperceptibly to the big scheme of things, so that he’d be down there on earth, his feet touching cobblestones, his nose sniffing cigarette smoke and cheese and herring and hot coffee and freshly baked macaroons, not up here breathing the sad, refined air of the abandoned cosmonaut.

Screams spill into the air above the square as the boat rises to its apex and hangs there, undecided whether to fall back or to plough on through the zero. Its passengers, suspended motionless, are much closer to him than the people on the ground – but then they’re upside down, and unlikely to look his way and notice his predicament. They hang there for a few seconds, then are fed on round their wheel: no cross to hold them back. Beneath them the square’s cobbled in alternating movements, like the parquetry of floors in Prague. Men are leaning on the window sills of the old people’s home, beneath the clock’s round face. To the home’s right, beside the metro, are the two men and their little radio. To the home’s right, the Chinese supermarket, indecipherable writing strung up in banners, red and gold, above its door. Beside that, three long benches, all mosaicked, then short, mushroomy seats
dotted around them. Then the Chinese fish shop. Those men in jackets are still there, parked in front of it, more of them now: a second car has turned up and four men have joined the first three. They’re pointing towards the Loosje, where Han and Sasha’s table seems now to be moving, warping …

Nick’s feeling very faint. His mouth’s parched; his whole body’s dehydrated. He can’t let himself pass out: the hook would hurtle straight up; it might even knock him over, off the edge, to crash down onto the pavement. Don’t look there, he thinks: concentrate, look up. There are the ships’ masts again, beyond Centraal Station. They’re all bundled up together, criss-crossed, matchsticks strung with thread. Tonight there will be fireworks, rockets shooting up into the sky and hanging there like stars, then flickering out. Up here, Nick feels close to the dead. Maňásek, his grandfather, Joost, Anton. Not that they keep him company – he’s alone, they all are – but he feels that he’s entered the same zone as their aloneness, their alonenesses. Why did he list Anton with the dead? He’s delirious now. Seagulls are cutting the sky up, leaving trails of light behind them, traces, like when you overexpose a photograph. Palackého Most. Maňásek’s here now, directing the seagulls, clapping, like a conductor marshalling the sections of a symphony orchestra. The old, stooped man leaves the dry-cleaner’s, looks up, then shuffles on. The Bulgarians have started moving, cutting past the benches and the dot-seats in between them, closing in on Han and Sasha. Did he think Bulgarians? A girl said it to Joost, screamed it again and again:
Bulharský!
The white place:
Heaven
, Joost said as their beers came. Got to go up somehow to get there. A helicopter will do. Or a bubble. Pulleys leave something to be desired. The men with radios are moving forwards too. The Bulgarians’ hands are reaching for their inner pockets.
Gaping symphony
. The boat’s going round and round, not pausing as it now flips over twice, three times, screams looping over screams still hanging there
from last time round, louder and louder. Now it’s getting dark; dusk’s falling quickly, coming down in blotches. The fireworks have already started: their bangs are rising from the square, mixing with screams and the boat’s spinning or is it the wheel spinning or is it just the earth, in orbit, spinning?

* * * * *

 … entirely unaware how long I’ve been here. Days, certainly. It could be weeks, or even months. The batteries on my directional microphone are dead, but this is immaterial. Nights are chill, but not particularly cold. Sometimes I make a fire from dead twigs; recently, however, flowers have begun sprouting from the bushes that surround the buffers beside which I sleep, and I’m reluctant to disturb the natural balance of their habitat. There are birds too: they open their mouths, perhaps to sing, but no sound comes from them. There’s no one left to synchronize, to dub. Between the rails, just where they end against the buffers, I have placed a mattress I encountered some time ago while investigating this remote part of the shipyard. I encountered coats, too. I sleep on this, under these. I eat dehydrated, powdered food from packets, deeming it unnecessary to add water. Not far from where I’m situated, ships are being dismantled: this much I know. They have been mounted on rollers, stripped down to their hulls. The rollers slide on rails into the water – only they don’t slide. Here, movement is extremely rare. Very occasionally, I see a man, or men, walk over and point welding torches at the hulls, with a view to stripping sheets of metal from them – or, perhaps, tracing patterns on their surface, as though the rusty metal contained diagrams and maps they were consulting. Most of the time the hulls are without visitors. Cranes stand above the dock – stiff, as though with rigor mortis. Chains hang limp from these. As far as I can see, they serve no purpose.

There is a factory beside the dock, but this is derelict. Most of its windows have been broken. Aerials, perhaps for television, sit above its roof-tiles, but I doubt that these receive and pass on messages. There is no more signal: I’m entirely unaware how long I’ve been here, but I know this much. There is no signal, and there is no noise. Wires lead from the factory towards lamp-posts from which loudspeakers dangle, broken. The wires dip as their distance from each post increases, reaching a nadir when their distance from one post is equivalent to that from the post’s neighbour, whereupon they rise, reaching a summit as they join the next post. Then they dip again. Beneath them, the rails lead away, converging. In the main part of the shipyard, behind me, the rails have been lined up – straight ones, warped and twisted ones, ones with markings on the side. Here, the rails end against the buffers where I sleep. I deemed it wise to place my mattress between these, between the rails themselves, thus ensuring that, should I roll over in my sleep, they’ll function as a barrier preventing me from falling – 2 [two] barriers, one on each side. Why do I write this? Perhaps it is no longer necessary for me to continue. I will stop soon. Several metres from me, on the open ground, a set of movable, wheel-mounted steps has been abandoned. The steps lead nowhere. If one were to ascend them, one would simply end up on the ground again.

Recently, while examining the surface of the earth beside these steps, I encountered a lost, or possibly abandoned, playing card. Exposure to the elements had disfigured it considerably – nonetheless, I was able to discern on it the figure of the joker. He wore a black and red tunic on the four corners of which were printed (moving clockwise from the top left) a spade, a heart, a club and a diamond. The joker’s right trouser leg was blue, his left yellow, while, inversely, his right sleeve was yellow, his left blue. There were stars around his head. Further examination of the immediately surrounding earth
revealed, some time later – I am unable to say how much – a second, almost identical joker to be lying on the earth nearby, beneath a lost, or possibly abandoned, workman’s glove. This joker’s tunic was also red and black, and similarly decorated at the 4 [four] coordinate points with symbols from each suit – although the heart, the club and the diamond had been corroded on this one, leaving only the spade fully discernable. This joker differed from the other only inasmuch as the colours on his trousers and his sleeves were reversed, so that his left leg and right sleeve were blue, his right leg and left sleeve yellow. It strikes me as probable, although not certain, that the glove had been lost and not abandoned, as it numbered only 1 [one] – but that the jokers, by contrast, numbering 2 [two], had been deliberately discarded with a view to facilitating the smooth passage of a game in which jokers are redundant, as they are in a majority of card games. I would very much like to confirm my supposition, but I am unfortunately aware that, even if I were to identify the workmen from whose pack these 2 [two] cards came and, further, to enquire of them whether they did, indeed, deliberately discard both jokers, I would be unable to hear their reply. Besides, there are no workmen here. There’s no one left. Soon I will stop. Soon …