The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures (50 page)

He bought a map at the
gas station and spread it on the passenger seat. He’d parked in the sun, and
the material of the seats was hot as if it had just that minute been ironed.

The two-hour drive took
Hector four and a quarter hours, but finally he rolled up to the gates of his
Dad’s new place. Hector senior had thrown a fence around the whole area, but
most of the land was in a dip or depression in the land so pulling up at the
gate afforded a fine view of the ranch. There were half a dozen buildings,
including several tall barns. Several heavy machines were visible, diggers,
tractors. Huge spools of cable lay piled in the shade of one of the barns.
Round-shouldered apricot-coloured hills dominated the horizon.

Hector pulled out his
mobile and called his Dad’s land-line. After a dozen rings his Dad picked up.

“Dad? I’m here. I’m at
the gate.”

“Yeah,” replied his
father. He always, or so it seemed to Hector, began his sentences with this
drawly, emphatic assertion of positivity. More than a tic it had become a
self-caricaturing habit. “Why didn’t you use the intercom?”

“I’m using my mobile.”

“Yeah. Well, the gate’s
open.”

And so it was. Hector
got back in the car and nudged the gate open with the fender; and, not
bothering to stop, get out, shut it again, he drove straight down the side of
the
little hill into the declivity where the ranch house was. Pulling
up to park alongside a grey four-by-four, itself parked beside a truck, he
could see his father standing on the porch with two other people.

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.

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.