The Weightless World (11 page)

‘It was a mast!’ I hoot, getting in a couple more good kicks at Ess’s leg. ‘That pylon thing, it was a mast!’ I turn to Laxman. ‘It’s your mast, isn’t it? We saw your wifi mast.’

‘Did you?’ Again he grins his ghastly grin. ‘Which one?’

‘Ha!’ Ess says, and kicks my feet until I have to actually roll him over in the dust.

While we eat, Laxman tells us about his village (its factions, its rivalries, of which he speaks with a tolerant irony) then he gets up to leave. When he shakes our hands Ess tries to pass him some money. Laxman doesn’t want it; but Ess insists. Their struggle becomes ludicrous. Ess keeps driving the notes at him; Laxman keeps driving them back. Then Laxman doesn’t quite throw the notes down – they slip from his fingers and flutter to the ground. I pick them up and slide them into my pocket. Laxman bows to each of us, smiling with closed lips, then turns and heads away down a crowded lane.

If Ess is embarrassed he doesn’t show it. He smiles, sighs, gazes contentedly round the courtyard.

After a while I say, ‘Last night. I know you don’t want to talk about it…’

‘I do not,’ he agrees.

‘I just think I deserve to know what the situation is. Between you and Asha.’

For a moment he goes on smiling brightly and blandly round the courtyard, a sort of holding position. Then, without any change of expression, he starts to say, ‘I honestly don’t know. True, while I was here last… it was an exciting time, as I’m sure you can appreciate. Both of us were terribly excited. We were solving a mystery together, we were…’ He is hating this; the strained dome of his forehead shows how much. ‘I think perhaps we got rather carried away. There was a night, not long before I came home… but I can say in all honesty I had no thought there would be any recurrence of, any resumption of… Altogether I was quite as surprised by our rapprochement last night as you were.’

‘I doubt that.’ I consider rolling him over in the dust again, but don’t. ‘Do you see it going anywhere?’

‘I’m by no means persuaded there is an “it”. And no, I don’t see “it” going anywhere, because at present my thoughts are not tending in that direction. Naturally I’m not opposed to the idea, Asha is… well, she’s… all I mean is let’s deal with one thing at a time, shall we? First things first.’ He goes back to his survey of the courtyard.

It occurs to me that, while he’s in a talkative mood, now may be a good time to ask Ess about Harry – about who Harry is, about what Harry is up to, or whether he’s up to
anything
– but before I can find a way into the subject he says, ‘Isn’t it marvellous? All this? Gandhi said “the soul of India is its villages”. Did you know that?’

‘I didn’t know that.’

‘And to think, if Tarik had his way, we’d never even get to see it…’

‘Why is that? Why doesn’t he like us coming here?’

‘
Oh
… Tarik has some funny ideas.’ He laughs indulgently. ‘Thinks there are spies round every corner, company eyes and ears the length and breadth of the continent, bounty hunters
desperate to collect “the price on his head”, who knows what else…’

‘You think he’s not right about that?’

‘I think he’s a touch overcautious. No one, no company on earth has the resources he seems to imagine his angry old bosses have.’

‘Have you told him that?’

‘Of course I have.’ Ess beams readily – maybe half a second too readily. ‘Told him till I was blue in the face. But would he listen?’

‘Couldn’t you…
make
him listen?’

‘How do you propose I would do that?’

‘I don’t know, it just seems… you’re saying the only thing keeping him out here is a mistake. The only reason he’s hiding in that crappy cabin is some wild idea he’s got about the power of his old company. If you could make him see that… well, he’d be free, wouldn’t he? That’s right, isn’t it?’

‘I suppose it is.’ Ess beams. In this beam his teeth are forks, glinting spikes.

‘He could do what he wanted, go where he liked. Free as a bird.’

‘Yes, I suppose he could.’ Ess beams his spiky beam. Then he frowns, somewhat flutteringly, and says in a rapid undertone, ‘I’m just not sure we can describe Tarik’s state of mind as being simply “mistaken”. Believe me, I’ve told him these things, and he rebuffed my arguments with a vociferousness that suggested the issues went… rather deeper. Naturally I don’t want to cast aspersions over our good friend, though when we consider what he’s been through, what infernos he’s passed through, we can hardly be surprised if along the way he’s acquired… complications.’ Ess sighs, twists a smile into the middle of his frown. ‘You see, poor creature, he’s formed a sort of delusion. Awful, I know. And yet in a case such as this, positively the worst thing you can do is try to force a chap to confront his delusion.
Far better to go along with the delusion, to tolerate it, to pet it even, and wait until it breaks up of its own accord. Altogether the best policy.’

I look at him. Then I start to nod. ‘You really think that’s best?’

‘I really do.’

I sit nodding. ‘Tarik’s delusional. He has delusions about things.’

‘When we consider what he’s been through, the gauntlet, the defile of flame…’

‘Do you think maybe he has delusions about other stuff?’

‘What other stuff would that be?’

‘Maybe this whole thing. Antigravity, his machine, the whole thing…’

‘In what sense?’

‘Well. Maybe it doesn’t work.’

Ess laughs, not at all indulgently, a reproving hard bark. ‘You’re forgetting, dear boy, I’ve seen it. Evidence of my own eyes.’

‘How do you know what you saw? How does anyone? If someone’s made up their mind to fool you, to
deceive
…’

‘If you’re a complete idiot…’

‘I’m not saying that. But if you
want
to believe, if you
want
it to be true…’

‘If you’re crazy, if you’re a crazy person who’s lost their mind.’

I sit back, away from him, showing him the palms of both hands.

After a while I take out my cigarettes, light up, begin gustily smoking. Ess watches me curiously: something he’s not seen before. Then he says, ‘Could I trouble you for one of those?’ I hand him the pack and he lights up also. Absorbing the first sharp lungful, he waves his cigarette airily and says, ‘Think about where we are. How logical is what you’re suggesting?’

I don’t say anything. Then I say, ‘I don’t follow.’

‘If Tarik were taking us for a ride. Supposing what I saw the last time was an illusion, a rope trick. Now we’re here, we’ve
got access to the money, so why would he delay? Why keep the deception going when he could’ve simply extracted his fee and bumped us off the night we arrived? Couple of hired hands, he could’ve done it in two minutes. Clueless foreigners, remote location. Flip open a laptop, wave a knife in our faces while we transfer the funds, all that, then slit our throats and chuck our bodies in the river. Easy as pie.’ He smiles at me, fairly gently. ‘You see? It doesn’t make sense.’

I don’t say anything. Because now I finally see it, the thing I’ve been missing. Tarik is dangerous. Whatever else he is – criminal hoaxer, curdled nerd, all-out lunatic – he’s a threat to us, to our actual
lives
.

As we re-cross the plain, my thoughts are all questions. What am I doing here? Why did I come here? Because Ess told me to? Because Martin Cantor told me to? How did I fail to see that this entire trip was not simply madness but
incredibly dangerous
madness? Who kept that from me? Who allowed any of this to happen?

It strikes me that the only decisive action I’ve taken since arriving in this country was my refusal to tip the staff of the hotel in Mumbai. I could cry, I could scream.

As we approach Tarik’s cabin, several things start to happen. My elbow starts to pulse, my double dose of malaria pills starts to clank in my stomach, my back starts to click, click, click. Tarik comes out of his cabin and starts shouting at us about something. Hearing the noise, Harry and Asha start walking towards us from the direction of the river.

Tarik shouts at Ess, who for a while tries to speak calmly during Tarik’s pauses for breath, then starts shouting also. Tarik gestures repeatedly and violently towards the village. With both
hands Ess grips his head, as if trying to rip it open. They’ve been at it for some time before I realise they’re speaking English.

While they argue Tarik’s face keeps changing shape. It darkens, splinters, jags. It’s the face of a dangerous man, the face of a violent lunatic, the face of a murderer. It can be the face of no other sort of man. How did I fail to see it? How did I contrive not to know?

Harry and Asha stand nearby, in bathing costumes, their arms draped with towels. They look on with expressions of amusement, and irresponsible unconcern. I could seize their wet shoulders, scream into their dripping faces:
Run!

Still shouting, Tarik swivels away from Ess and begins to march towards his test site. Ess starts after him, but as a gap widens between them I see my chance. I scuttle to Ess’s side and, almost fainting with terror, with the pain in my back, with the malaria in my veins, I grab his arm. ‘We need to go,’ I say.

‘What?’ he shouts, still striding after Tarik, who has stepped in between the blocks and disappeared from view. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘We need to leave. We need to get in the car…’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘We need to
leave
…’ Gnashing with pain, frothing with malaria.

‘We’re not going anywhere. They only place we’re going…’

‘Jesus fucking Christ.’ I throw myself in front of him. ‘If we stay here…’

‘What? If we stay here what? What’s wrong with you?’

‘What’s wrong with me…’

Smoothly the sun changes its place in the sky. In the middle of the blazing afternoon we’re standing in darkness. Ess looks past me and up. I turn and look up also and there are six blocks of concrete lightly anchored twenty or thirty feet above the surface of the plain.

Six blocks of concrete lightly anchored twenty or thirty feet above the surface of the plain.

In the air. Above the ground. Identical grey-black hulks with their straight lines, their corners and edges, moored in the white sea of the sky.

Tarik stands gazing up, surrounded by wires. His hands rest loosely on the platform in front of him, either side of the machine. He, the machine and the platform all look suddenly and obscenely exposed, though none of them seems to have noticed yet. Moving his head very slightly from side to side, he wears a faint contented smile. A man at leisure on a warm day, scanning the sky for any sign of a change in the weather.

Ess smiles, sighs, shakes his head, takes a couple of steps towards the blocks, arms open, as if planning to take them into one of his famously enveloping embraces. Then he stops, spins round, glares back at me with bared teeth. His eyes crushed to slits, his lips glittering, scaled, spittle-seared.

‘See?’
he hisses.

Harry drops his towel. There it goes, out of his arms, over his belly, down his legs, into the dust. His mouth falls open, his eyes
widen with an elderly jitter. He puts his hands into his beard and starts winding up little bits of it, tying his fingers into its straggly coils, as if bracing himself for impact. He looks exactly, exactly like an American grandfather surprised by a TV film crew bringing heart-melting news during a family outing to the beach.

‘Oh wow,’ he says. ‘Oh I mean
wow
.’

Asha laughs. She hooks her towel over her shoulders and just stands there, laughing.

I say, ‘No.’

I look, I see. I wonder if I’m going to pass out. I wonder if I’ve already passed out – if I’m in fact not here at all, not standing in the middle of the plain in the middle of the blazing afternoon, but lying under a blanket on the backseat of the Adventurers car while Asha jolts over pot hole after pot hole in the headlong, mosquito-tumbled night, speeding to reach the nearest clinic, to save me from the lethal weir opened at my elbow, the death-white waters of malaria. Am I here? Or there? Or where am I? Lying on a bed in a hospital room, watching specks form and reform, configure and refigure on a blank field of ceiling?

‘No,’ I say.

After a while Ess turns away from me and starts walking towards the blocks.

Soon Asha steps past me and starts walking towards the blocks.

Harry steps past me and starts walking towards the blocks.

I look down. I lean forward, put my hands on my knees and stare at the ground.

The earth, dry, grey, particulate. The rippling and waving of this bare stretch of plain land, the torsions of the microterrain, its straining fault-lines, its stones in their sheared grids. Familiar and yet fascinating, banal and bizarre. What’s more real than the earth? There it is, right under your feet.

I straighten, look up again, and there they are.

Six blocks of concrete airily anchored twenty or thirty feet above the surface of the plain.

Each of the airborne blocks is anchored at its outer end by the rope tied round its middle and descending to a loophole in a metal stake hammered into the ground. Each of these ropes now describes a taut diagonal line, but shows no suggestion of strain.

Similarly, each block is anchored at its inner end by the wire tied round its middle and descending to a port in the machine on the platform in front of Tarik. Similarly, each of these wires is taut but free from strain.

The ropes and the wires are roughly the same length, but not quite, and the longer you look the more clearly appear the subtle differences in elevation from block to block: a nosing-up here, a dipping-down there. And yet, you feel, smoothly, strongly, without strain, each block is seeking the level, as water does.

I start walking towards the blocks.

‘What do we think?’ Ess shouts, spinning at the edge of the test site, arms open, apparently surveying us each in turn for our opinion. ‘Shall I do it?’

The blocks no longer seem identical. Up there, the way the light dives at them, hacks at them, peels the skin from their surfaces with its crazy little knives.

‘Shall I, though? Who thinks I should do it?’

Texture like combed hair. Like charity-shop chiffon. Like adolescent acne. Like polystyrene packaging. Like pond scum. Like ancient bark. Like everything on and of the earth.

‘No!’ Asha shouts, laughing.

‘I really don’t think…’ Harry says.

‘Don’t do it!’ Asha laughs.

‘No, sorry, I’m going to do it,’ Ess says.

Nor are the blocks quite motionless. They carry no force, exert no pressure, the perception of which itself rolls over and over in the stomach like vertigo. They look exactly as they did while they stood on the ground, possess the same dimensions and substance, except now they are weightless. The majesty, the terror of their weight is gone and they turn on their anchor-lines as the breaths and breezes of the plain dictate.

Ess, arms open, spinning at the edge of the test site.

Then I see what he’s going to do.

A block of concrete the length and breadth and depth of a backyard swimming pool.

Suspended above the hard pack of the plain by a wire the thickness of fishing line.

By a machine that works but shouldn’t work, that may realise its mistake at any moment.

He’s going to run underneath it.

A connection failing. A circuit silently blowing. An invisible fault twanging the length of the taut-drawn wire.

And then the return, the revenge of all that weight.

He runs under the block.

A bird blurred to shadow skimming a lake surface at night.

He runs out the other side. Spinning. Falling over. Hooting in the dust.

Then we’re shouting, all of us, screaming out our lungs.

It happens then it’s happened.

The world is not what it was – is no longer or never was.

Everything slides, everything spills. That terror.

The earth is fluid pouring away. The sky a huge gaudy reflection – slightly tinselly.

Then the earth is the earth and the sky is the sky and the world is just what it is now.

That shift, that accommodation.

Okay
.

I run towards Ess. By the time I get there he’s back on his feet.

He grabs my shoulders. I sort of grab his.

‘Do you see?’ he shouts into my face.

‘I do. Jesus fucking Christ, I
do
see,’ I shout into his.

Harry is jumping on the spot, his hands joined over his head in a prizefighter’s composite fist. His belly keeps elbowing for more room over the waistband of his swimming trunks. His feet kick at his towel under him. The towel flaps, snaps, catches on his long toes.

‘What do you see?’ Ess shouts.

‘What do I see? I see the end of the world is what I see.’

‘Which is what?’

‘No more cars.’

‘No more car crashes.’

‘No more buses.’

‘No more bus stops.’

‘No more traffic lights.’

‘No more roundabouts.’

‘No more roads.’

‘No more motorways.’

‘No more
roads
.’

‘Which is before you even get to the money.’

Laughing, Asha falls to her kneels, rolls onto her side, laughing.

‘No more what? Tell me.’

‘No more trains.’

‘No more railways stations.’

‘No more railway lines.’

‘No more ships.’

‘No more planes.’

‘No more docks.’

‘No more airports.’

‘No more bicycles.’

‘No more bicycle lanes.’

‘No more, no more
wheelchairs
…’

‘Which is before you even give a thought to the money.’

Harry bends, scrapes at the towel wrapped round his feet, working his arm like a mechanical claw in a tank full of fairground treats. He scrapes, misses. Scrapes, misses.

‘You did this.’

I grab Tarik’s shoulders. He smiles, nods, pleased, embarrassed.

‘Yes,’ he says.

I grab the sides of his face.

‘How did you do this?’

‘Well, I…’

‘You’re a genius. That’s how you did it, Tarik.’

I squeeze his face. His specs ride up, his lips turn to pink blubber.

He tries to say something but the blubber can’t get it out.

‘Oh, yeah. That’s how you did it. You’re a genius, Tarik.’

I want to kiss him, I want to fuck him, I want to bear all his babies.

Asha stops laughing. She sits up and starts taking photographs.

‘You
did
this.’

‘I did. But I can’t…’

‘Just you. Just you, Tarik…’

‘No, no.’

‘You mean your guys, your team…’

‘No, no.’

‘Who do you mean, Tarik?’

I let go of his face. He plucks at the frame of his specs and places them back in true on the bridge of his nose. He smiles at me and seems to say, ‘My lever.’

‘Your what?’

‘My lever,’ he seems to say again.

‘Your lever?’

‘My what?’

‘Your lever.’

‘No, no.’ He laughs, amused, embarrassed. ‘My Reva. My Reva. My wife.’

Like
my Alice
. Like
my Eunice.

‘Oh,’ I say. ‘Oh
of course
.’

‘Yes. Of course.’

Harry scrapes at his towel, misses it.

Then the air comes out of him and he flops forward like a punctured balloon. Slack and heavy, he rolls in the dust. Puckers of deflation on his belly and head.

Ess shouts. Because he shouts, I shout as well.

Tarik runs to Harry, crouches at the fallen man’s side.

Because he runs and crouches, I run and crouch too.

Asha carries on taking photographs.

‘Oh wow,’ Harry says.

He’s sitting up, his thick pale legs spraddled in front of him. His face starkly red and blue. His hands shaking, with the lumpy stitches of their veins.

‘He needs water,’ Tarik says.

‘Oh boy. Just give me a minute here…’

‘Do we have water?’

‘I’ll get some,’ I say. ‘No problem. I’ll get some water.’

All our bottles are empty.

Before anyone can stop me I run back across the plain to the Adventurers car and realise only when I get there that the car is locked. The backseat full of water bottles in their high-stress plastic wrap. I pull uselessly at the door anyway.

I start to run back towards the test site, back to get the car-keys from Asha, then I stop running and stand for a second in the tinfoil glare of Tarik’s cabin.

I glance back towards the test site. The vast sailing black slabs. I try the door to Tarik’s cabin. It opens easily and I go inside.

Inside the cabin is mostly shelves – wood shelves on three sides, aluminum brackets, floor to ceiling, huge cans and sacks of dry food, huge containers of drinking water.

At one end a hammock, like a grubby net, and a heap of threadbare rugs.

At the other end a workbench covered with bits of what look like broken telephones, fax machines, radios, cassette players, stereos.

A stack of circuit boards. A soldering iron in its neat nylon pouch.

A laptop standing open with its screensaver slideshow, looped cameraphone shots, a very fat woman smiling in various sunny locations.

A ribbed metal box, like a smallish toolbox.

A wall of cabinets, all locked.

A fridge with two unopened two-litre bottles of water in it.

I take one, close the fridge, and leave the cabin.

I start running back across the plain.

As I go I have an oblique sense of something else I saw in Tarik’s cabin, something I saw and didn’t see, something in the small toolbox, which in fact isn’t a toolbox but a carry-case, which doesn’t contain tools but something else, which in fact is a gun.

I’m still running when the blocks begin to lower out of the sky. I stop to watch them. Behind a rustling curtain of heat haze the black slabs smoothly descend. As they touch back down on the plain a skirt of pale dust furls out round them then spreads and thins and then disappears altogether.

Harry is still sitting on the ground where I left him. The wide burn marks in his bald head, the weeping blisters, the ruts and scuffs.

Asha is sitting next to him, her bag spread on her knee, her camera dangling from its strap round her neck. Ess and Tarik are nowhere in sight.

Asha takes the bottle from me and passes it to Harry. We both watch him drink.

‘Man, do I feel a fool,’ he says.

‘We need to get you out of this sun,’ Asha says.

‘Oh, there’s no call for that…’

‘You need rest, you need shade…’

‘I don’t think I do. No sir.’

He gets to his feet like water somehow running uphill.

‘Where’s Tarik?’ he asks.

Where’s Ess?

Ess and Tarik are standing inside the circle of re-earthed blocks, a short distance from the machine on its platform. Harry, Asha and I enter the circle and move along between the blocks, their eerie dust-sprayed surfaces, their otherworldly pocked sides.

Ess grins at us, salutes.

‘All things considered, I’d say that went rather well, wouldn’t you?’

‘Have you tried it on a human being?’ I ask Tarik.

‘On a person? No, no.’

‘You need to try it on a person.’