The Weightless World (15 page)

‘Here we are,’ Harry announces, but I start to drag back, then stop. He stops also. ‘Cigarette heaven.’

‘I don’t think so,’ I say.

‘Come on. Buy you a pack of cigarettes.’

‘I don’t really need cigarettes.’

‘No?’ He lumbers up to me, squints into my face. ‘When did you last drink?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Water, tea, anything. When’d you last drink anything?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Look at you. You’re dehydrated. Dry as a bone.’ He slaps my shoulder, Ess-style. ‘Come on. Cigarettes and tea. Believe me, you need it. Nice hot tea.’

A cup of tea. Do I need it? Then I think about it and I realise that my mouth is a bone and my tongue is a smaller bone and I think fuck it and I go with Harry into the shack.

The room inside is lit by a kerosene lamp standing on one end of a longish table that acts as a counter and divides the front of the room from a smaller, darker area at the back. In this back area an old man is sitting in a chair, hunched forward, reading or praying, and when we come into the shack he stands and moves with a shuffling elliptical grace to face us over the counter. The lamp on the table in front of him illuminates every horror-film splinter and sliver of his upsidedown grin.

Harry tells him what we’re looking for and the man retreats shouting into the back area then returns with a cardboard box that he sets down on the counter and urges Harry to examine. Harry passes the invitation to me and I look in the box, which contains packets of utterly unfamiliar brands of cigarette – logos like alien hieroglyphs, colours like a parallel universe. Finally I choose a packet. Harry tries to pay but the man shoos us away from the counter, comes round to our side with a chair in either hand. He puts the chairs down and waves for us to sit. We sit and the man retreats again into the shack’s back area.

A few minutes later the man returns, monitoring the progress of a boy – no doubt the person he was shouting at earlier. The boy is about nineteen, tall and athletic, wearing a full Manchester Utd football strip and carrying a tea tray. He’s holding the tray out to us before I notice his disfigurement: a wild white flower of discoloration covering almost the entire left side of his face. Harry, with courteous thanks, takes his cup of tea. Silently I take mine and the boy and the man retreat together to the other side of the counter.

I sip my tea and Harry sips his and as he does his face flickers and reveals his true intention in bringing me to this shack in the middle of nowhere, which is his intention to kill me, to have me
killed, and the old man and the disfigured boy are the killers, or maybe just normal desperate people seduced by his American dollars to the point that they will kill. And this is the point we’re all at now, we’re all together in the execution chamber, locked up in the volt room, and there is only this one long looping moment while Harry sips his tea and I sip mine before the man and the boy come forward and one of them pins me to the chair and the other grips my head and slits my throat with a sudden knife and Harry sits there with his cup in his hand watching me bleed and croak and die. I sip my tea. Harry sips his.

Then Harry says, ‘Let’s get out of here, shall we?’

We leave the shack. It’s almost night, almost too dark to see.

‘We need to talk,’ Harry says.

I nod hazily. This seems about right.

He lumbers towards one of the packing cases lying next to the shack, tests it with his foot, a light kick then a heavier one, presumably checking for stability and for any inhabitants that might come crawling out at an inopportune moment, and apparently satisfied he sits. I stand, arms folded. He picks up another, smaller case, shakes it about then sets it down again and pats its surface. I go on standing for a while then sit on the smaller packing case.

‘I guess you’re aware I’ve been talking to Tarik today. A lot of guy stuff, just chewing the fat. But also we got on to other subjects. You can see how that would happen.’

Again I nod.

‘One way and another we got on to the subject of Tarik’s, ah, arrangement with you gentlemen. And then, you know, the subject of his wife and so on and so forth.’

‘Reva,’ I say.

‘Reva. Yes.’ Harry sniffs. ‘That’s a sad story, isn’t it? Tarik, Reva… I mean I don’t know if what Tarik told me is exactly the same as what he told you guys, but I’m assuming it’s broadly the same. In summary.’

‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘I don’t know what he told you.’ I shrug. ‘I wasn’t there.’

‘That the machine is his wife’s invention and he took it to his company and tried to pass it off as his. He also said Reva was, ah, not impressed by his choices and left him. That the company got all up in his face and he had to hightail it out of there and recluse himself.’

I nod, shake my head: essentially perform Asha’s mysterious head waggle.

‘I assume that’s broadly the same?’

I raise my elbows in a non-committal way.

‘Steven.
Steven
…’ In the near night it’s easy to see how human he is. The bagged eyes, the twisting beard straggles, the lips constantly working to contain their spittle. Maybe I just mean how old he is. But now he draws the loose sack of his face into something more purposeful and he says, ‘I’m a respectful guy, a respecter of persons and choices and maybe not always was but ever more shall be. And yet let me tell you I do believe this is a time for you to talk on a level with me. Yes sir. I do believe this is that time.’

‘I don’t know what you want from me, Harry.’

‘I want to establish some common ground here. Can we do that?’ His expression is pained but wistful – the expression of a man withstanding the buffets of rich experience. ‘Believe me, I know how hard it is. I get that instinct to hold back, to break away, to put some distance between yourself and everything around you, people, places, backgrounds, histories, all of it, everything that wants to tie you down and tell you who you are. Because we don’t want to be who they tell us we are, we want to be who we say we are. And it’s hard. Hard to cross that gulf of difference between our lives, our persons and choices… oh, sure. I know all about that.’

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

‘No,’ Harry says. ‘Well, how could you.’

He falls into a silent argument with himself. While this goes on I grow aware of things moving about in the trees nearby, nighttime shapes crashing from branch to dark branch. Then Harry says, ‘Right now I’m trying to take the charitable view and allow that there must be factors,
knowledges
…’ He smiles at me, wanly, but also with a new sort of focus. ‘I’m a respectful guy, Steven, but I’m also a curious guy. If I get an itch, I have to scratch it. And that’s what happened when I heard Tarik’s story. Don’t misunderstand, I was moved, I was in some sense
wounded
by that pitiful story. But also it made me itch. So, you know, I started to look into some stuff.’ From a pocket of his combats he takes a stubby plastic podule and from the podule he takes his smartspecs, folded, dormant. ‘Nothing too serious. You know how this shit is. You open it up and you go swimming. Like exercise only without the actual exercise element. I don’t know that I was truly expecting to find anything. But, well, I did. I have to tell you I found something.’

He doesn’t have to say anything else. I already know what he’s going to tell me.

Reva has not been staying in a basement room in a hotel in Goa, or anywhere else. She is not by any means being brought to the plain, by Bill Fancy or by anyone else.

Because she’s dead.

‘I’m happy to share with you what I found, Steven. And I’m sharing this with you because I’m assuming this is something you guys didn’t already know. That when you made this arrangement with Tarik, and you agreed it would be a fair and symmetrical transaction for you guys to take the machine and its schematics and its rights and what all in exchange for Tarik’s wife. In exchange for the safe return of his wife, his wife who left him of her own as far as I can tell
will
, and who not only has never shown any indication of wanting to be returned to him, like, ah, laundry, but who also has gone to some trouble to make sure
he is not able to find her, to locate her, by any electronic means or so forth.’

She’s dead. Reva’s dead.

‘I want you to look at something.’ Harry waves the smartspecs at me. ‘With these.’

At last I nod. He opens the specs, they glow and boot up, he mutters a command to them – detaching them from his aura, his aegis – and he passes them to me. Somewhat awkwardly, I put them on. Then it’s weird: I can still feel the edge of the packing case under me, still hear the night shapes crashing about in the trees, but I’m somewhere else. Another space, another world. Light as substance, as landscape.

Harry mutters another command and an image forms in front of me, a photograph, a portrait hanging on a wall of light. I recognise it at once from the slideshow on the laptop in Tarik’s cabin: Reva smiling in Cubbon Park. Harry says, ‘You’ve seen this? I… like I say, I’m an itchy guy. I captured this from Tarik’s screen while we were talking. Tidied it up, put it to work.’ In the world of the smartspecs Harry’s disembodied voice is like the voice of god. I feel nothing unnatural about this. He continues, ‘There’s some nice stuff these days, face recognition and so forth, and to cut a long one short I fed the image you’re looking at into a brainy little gewgaw and what came clunking out the other end was… this.’

Next to the image of Reva another one appears. It’s a photograph of a woman. The woman is lying on an ashen background. The woman is large, heavy; her sides spread into the surrounding ash. The area round her face is blurred, crosshatched, buffeted by motion. Nonetheless it’s clear that the woman is dead.

‘She’s dead,’ I say. My voice is oddly flat, isolated, unresonant, in the brilliant world of light. ‘Reva’s dead.’

‘Yes,’ Harry says. ‘It would appear so. Reva’s dead.’

‘In Bangalore. The bombing.’

Harry doesn’t say anything.

‘We didn’t know,’ I say. ‘Ess didn’t know. When he made the deal he didn’t know.’

Harry doesn’t say anything.

‘There’s some bloke,’ I say, ‘some associate of Ess’s who says he’s got her, says he’s found her and he’s bringing her here. Ess doesn’t know. He’s paying this bloke, this private investigator guy…’

Harry says, ‘Reva didn’t die in Bangalore.’

‘In the bombing,’ I say. Then: ‘What?’

‘Reva didn’t die in Bangalore. She died in Kolkata.’ Harry mutters again and the two photos in front of me peel themselves off into nothing and a jouncing mosaic of images takes their place. Heaps of rubble, vortices of destruction. Crowds, ambulances. Some of the images are video or even live feeds and show rescue workers crowded round weeping faces, a man gesturing violently while others hold him, a woman kneeling, screaming, her face distorted into a funnel of grief. Another pane shows on a fade-in fade-out loop a gallery of figures laid against a background of ash. These figures don’t move. These figures are stillness itself. ‘She died in a building collapse in Kolkata.’

‘She… what?’ I tear off the smartspecs and reel back into the world. The night, the shack, the packing case, the crashing trees. Harry next to me looks as if he’s been woken from a deep sleep.

‘She died in Kolkata last week. There was a building collapse. An office block on the outskirts. Usual story, ignored regulations, paid-off officials. Two hundred and twenty-six dead and counting. Not a headline-grabber like a bombing, but…’

‘You know this how?’

‘Like I said, I used the picture, I ran the software…’

‘But you didn’t find her name?’

‘I did not find her name. But like I said, the software was able to link Reva’s picture to the picture you saw, from a gallery
showing those people killed in the collapse who’ve not yet been identified…’

‘Why would Reva be in Kolkata? In where did you say, an office block?’

‘I don’t know that I have that information. I only…’

‘Nah,’ I’m saying. I’m shoving the smartspecs into Harry’s hands, I’m standing up from the packing case, I’m saying, ‘Nah. No way.’

‘“No way”?’ Harry is aghast. ‘This is evidence.’

‘This isn’t evidence, this isn’t anything. This is pictures. This is blurs… This is blurs in a story about a building. You’re a
builder
, Harry. You’re reading the blurs in a story about a building and you’re a
builder
. This is gadgets, and gizmos, and
software
, and you’re, you’re…’ I rock from side to side on my feet. And with something like genuine anguish I say, ‘Why couldn’t you have just told me she died in Bangalore? I was ready for that. I was ready to believe that.’

Sitting on his case, Harry looks utterly deflated. But still he goes on in a low, skittish, muddled voice, ‘You believe what you like, Steven, that’s your right and I’m… all I’m saying is I can’t keep this to myself. I’m sharing it with you now so you gentlemen have a chance to keep some dignity. In the morning I’m taking this to Tarik and I’m showing it to him and I’m giving you guys until then to make your excuses and leave before Tarik finds out you’ve been promising to bring him a wife who’s been dead for two weeks.’ He blinks up at me with his human face.

‘Do what you want.’ I start away from him, calling back, ‘You show whatever you want to whoever you want. It doesn’t matter. It’s not true.’

‘I think Tarik should be the judge of that.’

‘Show him. Show him your “facial recognition” software. Show him your blurs and your bullshit algorithm. It’s
nothing
. You know it is and I know it is.’

‘Nonetheless, I think…’

‘Tarik should be the judge. Show him.’

‘Don’t let the money screw with you, Steven.’

‘It’s not
the money
that’s screwing with me, it’s…’

‘Don’t let the money get inside your head.’ He blinks up at me with that face of his. ‘You know what money is? Take it from someone who knows. It’s piss. It’s shit. A better piss and a better shit. You know what I mean? It’s… superior plumping. That’s all. Take it from me, Steven.’

‘Thanks. I’ll bear that in mind. You fucking fat old
prick
.’

‘We don’t have to speak this way to each other, Steven.’

‘I’ll speak to you any fucking way I please.’

‘In which case I stand by my former statement.’

‘Stand by it.’

‘You’ve got until morning. To leave. To walk away.’

‘We’re not leaving. We’re not walking away,’ I say, leaving, walking away.

For a while in the dark all I can make out is a need, which is the need to speak to Alice.

I need to see her face, to hear her voice. I need to ask her what I need to do, so I can do it.

I scuttle along over the plain with my need but not much direction. I look for the trees I saw earlier, the ones that resembled a firebombed shop, but I can’t see them. I look back, or what I think is back, to see if Harry is coming after me. I can’t see him either.

In the blinded dark I look forward again, or what I think is forward again, and resume my scuttling.

Harry. Fucking Harry. The fucking fat old
prick
.

Don’t let the money get inside your head
, he said.
It’s piss. It’s shit.
Meaning what? Something like: first to last money is bound to
the tides of the body, to the currents and slipstreams of the body, and can’t be diverted into higher channels. Well – so what? That’s the problem with people like Harry, or with the people Harry seems to be like: they’re always wanting to divert stuff into higher channels. But there aren’t any higher channels. There’s your body, and there’s money, and there’s the protection that money does or doesn’t buy it. And that’s all.

The fucking fat old…

I glance up and against the blue-black sky I make out distantly the black-black hulks of the test site and redirect my scuttling towards them.

Then I make out something else, which is a figure standing in front of me, which is Tarik’s figure. Then I make out something else, which is that Tarik’s figure is performing an action, which is the action of pointing a gun at me.

I am a person who a gun is pointed at. This is interesting. This is a person of a sort I’ve not been before.

Obviously I’m an idiot, a fool, a dick, but fortunately my reflexes are wiser than I am and know exactly what to do. My arms fly up from my sides, projecting my empty palms into the air, and my mouth calls out hootingly, ‘Tarik, Tarik! It’s me, it’s Steven! You know it’s me, don’t you, Tarik? Tarik, you know it’s Steven, don’t you?’

‘Steven,’ Tarik calls back, without tone. He lowers the gun. His head dips.

I am a person who a gun has been pointed at. This is true now forever.

Slowly I walk towards Tarik. His head is dipped, his face hidden, but for now I’m not especially interested in Tarik’s face. I’m interested in the gun, and give it my full attention. It’s lowered, pointing down, a somewhat ugly tool, catching no gleam off the immense prism of the plain twilight. Not like a prop in a movie but like something you’d shape metal with, cut down trees with.

‘Hey, Tarik.’ Without my having consciously done anything to it, my voice is calm, soothing. ‘What’s this?’

At last Tarik looks up and I see his face. The eyes, the lips, the nostrils are all jitter, all stutter. He’s an image embedded in white noise. He looks as if he could disappear at any second.